Are games on GOG ever dropped off the list? Or is it an ever-expanding smorgasbord of Good Old Games? If the games are dropped, is there any warning so we can scoop it up at the last minute?

Have they removed games before? Yeah. Operation Flashpoint and Obscure are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head, but there are a couple more. Generally because of rights issues. They do try to tell us if they have to remove it and have a sale.

Only due to licensing changes or when they're broken. Other than that they stay here permanently.

Sometimes there's no warning. Like what happened with Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. Luckily I picked it up some time before.

Usually, yes, there has been a warning. I think Hostile Waters was the only one dropped without one (nor an explanation). The reasons for dropping anything have - as far as I know - always been rights/licensing issues.

Colin McRae 2005 and Toca 3 were dropped due to the publisher's license to use the cars having ended. Operation Flashpoint had some licensing troubles with the music, I don't remember exactly what the issue was with Republic: The Revolution, Obscure and Hostile Waters. Original War was dropped, but came back. Moto Racer 3 was dropped for a while due to having some technical problems, but I believe it was made pretty clear that it would come back as soon as the GOG team had worked their magic on the game to get it working (or completely remove the DRM, one of those).

I probably missed a couple games, but those are the ones I remember.

Nothing have ever been removed from people who has already purchased the games, though GOG has stated that the possibility exists that a game MAY be removed from your account, and thus recommends that you make a local backup.

There was a scare recently that Jowood will be dropping their games, because the company was at the verge of going under. For now, it's still holding. For now.. Of course if that happened, we would probably put together a torrent if some Gogers bought the game and for whatever reason didn't download it or the extras. So there's really no reason to be nervous about your purchased games.

It was sort of both, though I believe the problem that prevented the game from working correctly was the fact that the DRM was not completely removed. It has already been returned to the catalog and is working both correctly and fully DRM free.

As if torrents doesn't already exist...

EDIT: although I believe they lack the extras, torrenters usually don't care abut those (didn't see that you mentioned them, hence the edit)

This would be a... er... "guilt free torrent"

<note to self: self flagelation later for this>

That one was a big bummer for me. I really wanted that game, but kept putting the purchase off. Then when I finally went to buy it, It was no longer part of the catalog.

*sadface*

The GOG community wiki has a category for games currently not being sold: [url=http://gogwiki.com/index.php?title=Category:Discontinued_products]http://gogwiki.com/index.php?title=Category:Discontinued_products[/url]

Woah.. justified text. Weird.

<trivial info>
It gets justified when you post too long link that breaks the line. Post it in new line to avoid.
</trivial info>

;)

Interesting.. thanks for the info :)

Operation Flashpoint was probably removed due to disagreements between Codemasters and Bohemia Interactive. But it seems it's now back to the hands of Bohemia, renamed as ARMA: Cold War Assault (except for the Red Hammer expansion).

This is recent information, so we may see it here again soon. I hope so.

Apparently, games have been dropped for licensing reasons, but people who bought them still had access to them from their account.

Licensing disagreements are always a potential source of problems it seems.

Beyond that, I'll be curious to see how they handle the transition to Windows 7 (Vista has 10 good years left of support, less than that as a mainstream OS).

The DOSbox games were trivial (keep DOSBox compatible, that's it).

Games from the Windows 98 era might be something else entirely. I don't know much about state of the art Windows Retro emulators, but I'd say they might have to get their hands dirty and tweak the source code.