GOG has long been a proponent of game preservation, with its Game Preservation Program seemingly working tirelessly on getting old PC games up and running on modern hardware and providing downloadable, DRM-free, offline installers for those games, and recently even partnering with Big Box Collection to host printable game covers and 3D scans of physical game boxes. Now, in a recent interview with GamesRadar+, GOG’s senior business development and partnerships manager, Marcin Paczynski, said that the DRM-free game storefront has ambitions to bring physical media back to PC games.Marcin Paczynski via GamesRadar+Ideally, my dream would be to be able to buy physical versions of those games on GOG. You go to your shelf on GOG, you click on the game that you would like to receive a physical copy of, you order it, and it gets to you. That would be a perfect scenario.
In addition to potential legal hurdles of physical game distribution, which would require “additional approvals” from publishers, Paczynski explains that some of the most challenging aspects of reviving physical games for PC come down to the added complexity of distributing physical media.Because we are talking about physical media, we need to think about logistics. We need to think about storage…. This is an idea that has been floating around GOG for years now, and still, I really hope that at some point we will be able to do it. We’ll see.Cost and simplicity are often cited as common justifications for Sony’s recent decision to stop producing physical games media for the PlayStation 5. Recent reports from industry veterans suggest that companies like Sony could save as much as $10 or more per game copy sold after going disc-free. Even Microsoft’s recent disc-to-digital initiative appears to mostly be geared at preparing the Xbox ecosystem for a disc-less future.
