If you only read the headline, GOG is still selling both games until December 13th.
Now, I have to weigh the calculus: do I buy the games just because, knowing there is basically zero chance I boot them up? What if that was Blizzard's end game -to drive scarcity?
Drive scarcity? I was playing pirated WC3 20 years ago, on pirated battle.net. There's no such thing as scarcity for old games. They will forever be available as long as there are seeders.
yeah but now i have to trust some random magnet link and hope it's not gonna drop some sort of rootkit on me. and yeah okay there are ways around that like using an old laptop or heavily sandbox'd VM.
but now i'm not just snagging a file, i'm creating an entire workflow. i'll just pay for the actual, clean binary
Had similar thoughts, but in the end decided that having the option of playing some of my favourite games from childhood was worth more to me than any spite I have towards Blizzard.
They have shown themselves to be bad curators of their own catalogue, so I bought a copy to avoid having issues during some possible future point when I just want to experience some nostalgia.
like other game companies (cough Nintendo) their old library is viewed as direct competition with their current set of games/subscription products. also wotmrth remembering that Blizzard is now a Microsoft property.
> like other game companies (cough Nintendo) their old library is viewed as direct competition with their current set of games/subscription products.
That's nothing special to game companies. All entertainment companies are the same way. That's why they push for longer and longer copyrights. Copyright is what protects Disney from having to compete with its own past work.
The only reason I buy anything from Disney is because of their older work. It would be interesting to see a comparison of revenue for Disney broken down by decade of first release. Does anyone have that sort of thing or is the data not public? / Could anyone point me to the data to do that sort of analysis?
Well, w98 was already "dead", it was a rehashed win95 with better plug and play, some fixes, activeX/IE4 down your throat an the same atrocious stability.
Now, I have to weigh the calculus: do I buy the games just because, knowing there is basically zero chance I boot them up? What if that was Blizzard's end game -to drive scarcity?