Good Old Games: What GOG Is and How DRM-Free Buying Works

Summary: Good Old Games is the original name of GOG.com, the Warsaw storefront that has sold DRM-free PC games since 2008. It dropped the name in 2012 once it started stocking modern titles, but the founding idea survived intact: buy a game, download an installer, keep it forever, with nothing checking up on you afterwards.

• DRM-free means an offline installer and no launcher, activation or online check. The file on your drive is the game.
• The Preservation Program is the original pitch made formal: the store pays to keep old titles running on current Windows rather than just reselling them.
• The trade-off against Steam is features, not price. Smaller catalogue, no family sharing, thinner social plumbing.
• In December 2025 the store left CD Projekt and went independent, which changed the ownership but not the product.

Two different searches land on this phrase. One group wants the storefront, because Good Old Games is what GOG.com was called for its first four years and plenty of people never updated the name. The other wants a list of games from before roughly 2005. The two overlap more than you would expect, because the store exists specifically to keep that second group supplied.

From Good Old Games to GOG

CD Projekt founded the store in 2008, before it was known for The Witcher and while its main business was still putting boxed games on Polish shelves. The pitch was narrow: take old titles that no longer ran on current Windows, do the engineering work to make them run again, and sell them without copy protection.

On 27 March 2012 the site rebranded to GOG.com and began stocking new releases alongside the back catalogue. The name had turned into a liability, since old was no longer accurate and was quietly repelling anyone browsing for something recent.

The bigger change came much later. In December 2025 CD Projekt sold the store outright to Michał Kiciński, one of its own co-founders, for 90.7 million zloty. GOG now operates independently, with a distribution agreement keeping CD Projekt's releases on the platform. Nothing visible changed for buyers, but the store is no longer a side business of a company whose attention is on Cyberpunk.

What DRM-Free Actually Means

Digital rights management is the machinery that checks you are allowed to run something: an online activation, a launcher that has to stay open, a licence server somewhere doing the confirming. DRM-free removes all of it.

In practice you get an offline installer, a single file you download and keep. Put it on an external drive and it will still install in fifteen years without contacting anybody. There is a client, GOG Galaxy, but it is optional in a way Steam's is not. Uninstall it and your games carry on working.

The obvious question is what stops you copying that installer to everyone you know. Nothing does. The store's original argument was that convenience and a fair price beat piracy for most people, and it is still in business seventeen years later, which is at least some evidence for the position.

The Preservation Program

Launched in November 2024 on the store's sixteenth anniversary, the Preservation Program is the founding idea turned into a standing commitment. Games in it carry a Good Old Game stamp, meaning the company has spent its own money getting them running on current Windows and intends to keep doing so as hardware moves on.

It started with 100 titles and has grown past 250, covering Diablo, Fallout, the first three Resident Evil games, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Deus Ex and the Ultima series. The work goes well beyond compatibility patches: restored cut content, new rendering options, bundled manuals, and in the case of Silent Hill 4, hauntings that had only ever appeared on the PlayStation 2 version.

This is the part that matters when choosing where to buy something old. Elsewhere you get the build as it shipped in 1998 plus whatever community patches you can track down. Here somebody is paid to keep it working, and on GOG the stamp sits on the store page, so you can tell at a glance which version you are actually getting.

GOG vs Steam: What You Give Up

Price is rarely the difference. Both stores run deep seasonal sales and the same title usually lands within a pound or two either way.

What you give up is infrastructure. Steam has family sharing, a workshop, remote play, a far larger catalogue and a review system with enough volume behind it to be useful. GOG Galaxy can aggregate libraries from other stores, which is genuinely good, but it is doing catch-up work against a fifteen-year head start.

What you gain is the installer. If a publisher pulls a game from sale, a music licence lapses, or a launcher gets retired, the copy on your drive is unaffected. All three have happened often enough to stop being hypothetical. If you are timing a purchase around discounts on either store, the seasonal sale calendar is the thing worth watching.

Keys, Licences and What You Actually Own

Buying DRM-free does not make a game your property. You hold a licence, the same as anywhere else, and the terms still restrict resale and redistribution. What changes is enforcement: there is no mechanism to revoke your access once the download is finished.

That distinction carries more weight than it sounds. A Steam key binds a licence to an account permanently, and the account is the thing that can be lost, banned or locked out of a region. An offline installer binds nothing to anything.

It also changes the risk on grey-market sellers. A cheap key from a marketplace like Kinguin can arrive already redeemed, because the licence is a single-use token and somebody else may have used it. That particular failure mode does not exist for a DRM-free download.

Running Old Games on Modern Hardware

Even preserved releases run into limits. Sixteen-bit installers do not work on 64-bit Windows at all, some games assume a processor slow enough to keep their internal timers honest, and a few expect a screen resolution that no longer exists on anything.

Most of this is handled by shipping DOSBox or ScummVM wrappers configured in advance, which is why a 1993 adventure game installs and launches like anything else. The awkward band is early Windows titles from roughly 1995 to 2001: too new for DOSBox, too old for compatibility mode, and dependent on graphics APIs nobody implements any more.

On a Mac the problem is simpler, because almost none of this is native to begin with. A virtualisation layer such as Parallels gets a Windows environment running well enough, and games of this vintage ask so little of the hardware that the performance cost barely registers.

Which Good Old Games Are Worth Buying

Not everything old is good, and nostalgia is an unreliable guide to your own evening. Three categories tend to survive contact with a modern player.

• Games built on systems rather than presentation. Strategy, simulation and immersive sims aged well because the appeal was never the graphics. Deus Ex, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and the early Civilization games play like current releases with fewer conveniences.
• Games with no modern equivalent. Nothing has replaced Thief, or Planescape: Torment, or the original X-COM. These are worth buying precisely because there is no newer version to buy instead.
• Games you intend to finish. One cheap classic you actually play beats a bundle of forty you do not. Bundle sites like Fanatical are excellent value and also the main reason people end up with libraries they never open.

Buy the Ones You Want to Still Have in Ten Years

The whole argument for Good Old Games comes down to time. Every other storefront is effectively a lease arranged around the assumption that the company will still be there and still care. An offline installer makes no assumptions at all, which is a smaller feature than it sounds for most purchases and a decisive one for a few.

It matters least for the game you will finish this month and most for the one you expect to reinstall in a decade. Choose on that basis rather than on price, and if you would rather fund the purchase without putting a card into another storefront, a GOG gift card covers it.