GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down IP Rights Holders

Summary

Approximately seventy years after video games first became a medium, the act of preserving older games has become more important than ever. The CDPR-owned GOG.com specialises in game preservation, tinkering with older games to ensure people can play these games without jumping through convoluted hoops to make them run on new hardware. However, the company's noble mission is far harder than the team behind the storefront initially expected. In an interview with The Game Business, Marcin Paczynski, GOG's senior business development manager, opened up about just how difficult game preservation can be. A Noble Goal via Aspyr "To be perfectly honest, it's harder than we thought it would be," Paczynski explained. "What we've found out is that games and how they work has deteriorated way faster than what we thought. And we are not talking only about the game not launching. We are talking about more subtle things as well, like the game not supporting modern controllers, or the game not supporting ultra-widescreen or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like not being able to minimise the game, which is an essential feature today." On top of the software troubles, there's also the small matter of obtaining the intellectual property rights of an old game. Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly inherited the rights to several games, but was super supportive of "preserving his family's legacy" when GOG tracked him down. Nightdive, a studio that primarily focuses on remastering and remaking classic titles, was actually created because the founder was annoyed he couldn't play System Shock. He tracked down the insurance company that inherited the rights to the franchise and purchased them, and then began working on remaking the iconic immersive sim. Pacyznski says digital rights management (DRM) features are especially frustrating to circumvent, which means they're working as designed. Heck, som...