[textadventure]

This was long coming and announced (Steam had a big hard to miss warning whenever opened on Win 7, for pretty much the entire year), but yet another reminder that when it comes to digital libraries (of games, apps, music, movies, books, etc), your "ownership" of your titles is dependent on countless variables.

Even though GOG's own client (GOG Galaxy) has been requiring Windows 10 for even longer, you could always just download the games from their website and manually install them no problem.

[exe34]

not your (gpl) source code, not your game.

[gjsman-1000]

Even if that were possible, the GPL license makes no sense for artwork or music, and is quite possibly legally unenforceable in such a context. You need a combination of GPL + Commons; and how many games are licensed that way?

But even then, GPL + Commons does not give you trademark rights, only the ability to reuse the assets under a different name. So unless you have GPL + Commons + Trademark, do you really have ownership?

But hold on, in Japan and in the US, game mechanics can be patented. So who cares if you have the code, assets, and trademark, if you don't have patent rights? I suppose you need GPL + Commons + Trademarks + Patent Assignment; or maybe you swap out GPL with Apache2.

Now hopefully whoever made the artwork doesn't sue for unpaid royalties. You're relying on the declared licenses, but it's still possible that whoever made the game, lied in one way or another. It's also possible there are applicable patents owned by other companies, which weren't disclosed.

The point is: Even with GPL code, it's still a long way from being "your game." I didn't even mention the middleware like Havok Physics or Unity Engine; which would render your GPL game code pretty useless without a proprietary attachment, if using the GPL license at all is even legal with such a combination.

[oliwarner]

It's easy enough to maintain ABI compatibility layers for games to run them indefinitely, even cross platform (eg Wine, emulators, etc etc etc)

I don't demand GPL rights over the movies I watch, or the books I read, so I'm not sure why I'd require that for games. Of course source-available would be better than not but it's not a hill I'm willing to die on. I'd rather play some good games.

[tylerchilds]

gpl is still subject to bit rot and likely the reason there aren’t more gpl games

there’s misaligned incentives between the people writing the game and the people wielding c compilers as political weapons.

i swear every time i can’t compile code it is not clear which aspect of c failed— the dynamic linker working around gpl limitations as technical debt, the kernel itself using a more advanced c with backwards breaking changes, the code being written for the wrong architecture triple, or the code was written for a different c compiler altogether

i don’t actually try and fix it because bit rot only gets worse if i notice the problem.

[brian-armstrong]

Choosing to disengage from the world does not make you brave