The reality is Valve often does a better job at preservation than GoG. They know that a game released on Steam in 2009 that hasn't received any updates will never be updated to support things like modern controllers, which is why they wrote Steam Input.
Even then, there's so many other things that can go wrong with games. With DOS-era titles, DOSBox does a pretty fantastic job, as long as you use a fork with useful features like DOSBox-X. With Windows titles the possibilities to preserve games is almost endless thanks to hooking. I've spent the past few years compiling a personal archive of games to get them in a playable state. For me, this often involves support for modern controllers and _at least_ natively rendering at a higher resolution. Compatibility shims like dgVoodoo make it easy to bump up the rendering resolution of a game, while preserving aspect ratio for games that may only support 4:3.
Graphics are basically solved with projects like dgVoodoo, and there's numerous dinput -> xinput solutions out there, but that's rarely the whole picture. WinSock could really benefit from a wrapper that tunnels traffic over the internet (VPNs are really like using a steam roller to drive a nail). Registry API calls really could be redirected to read from config files instead of relying on the weird bastardization of WOW64 and the VirtualStore. Hell, even file access could be redirected so we can contain all of a game's files.
I'm actually working towards implementing the latter two as a way to preserve the functionality of installers and allow their reimplementation through something like PowerShell.
>The reality is Valve often does a better job at preservation than GoG
My take on this is that GoG does exactly what I want, let me download offline installers and store them away myself.
Which makes it better at preservation than Steam.
I'm thankful for all the work steam does, including letting you continue to play games that were ripped off the storefront if you own them. I'm just not sure I trust steam in the long term.
On that same note its hard to trust GoG in the long term because they aren't profiting enough off their storefront, hence me keeping all of their offline installers on my own drives after buying a game. (and patch files!)
It gets depressing thinking about how bad we are at game preservation even with all the commercial and hobbyist efforts. I already have too many games piled up with a backlog of "maybe when I get a vacation/retire I can finally get around to these" that won't even be accessible in 30 years.
> The reality is Valve often does a better job at preservation than GoG.
They're solving very different problems: executing old games well that they still have the right to distribute vs reinstating access to games that have left circulation entirely (except perhaps abandonware sites). Neither of these is better or worse than the other.
I think my point might have not come across well. Valve/Steam tends to take a hands-off approach, let devs publish how they want and allow users to bring non-Steam games into their fold. GoG tends to modify game files to reach compatibility and has in a few cases completely broken or removed functionality from a game.
Even then, there's so many other things that can go wrong with games. With DOS-era titles, DOSBox does a pretty fantastic job, as long as you use a fork with useful features like DOSBox-X. With Windows titles the possibilities to preserve games is almost endless thanks to hooking. I've spent the past few years compiling a personal archive of games to get them in a playable state. For me, this often involves support for modern controllers and _at least_ natively rendering at a higher resolution. Compatibility shims like dgVoodoo make it easy to bump up the rendering resolution of a game, while preserving aspect ratio for games that may only support 4:3.
Graphics are basically solved with projects like dgVoodoo, and there's numerous dinput -> xinput solutions out there, but that's rarely the whole picture. WinSock could really benefit from a wrapper that tunnels traffic over the internet (VPNs are really like using a steam roller to drive a nail). Registry API calls really could be redirected to read from config files instead of relying on the weird bastardization of WOW64 and the VirtualStore. Hell, even file access could be redirected so we can contain all of a game's files.
I'm actually working towards implementing the latter two as a way to preserve the functionality of installers and allow their reimplementation through something like PowerShell.