Just in time to cash in on the remastered warcraft battlechest, the game will be removed from GOG.

GOG has comitted to maintain compatability to ensure the game remains playable.

https://www.eurogamer.net/warcraft-1-2-will-be-preserved-on-gog-even-after-blizzard-delists-them-later-this-month

It's so great of GOG to commit to keeping these classics playable into the future. Even though they aren't allowed to sell new copies anymore, everyone who did buy it can keep downloading it and with the game preservation program GOG commits to keep them playable even with changes to computers.

Here is GOGs announcement of this in their Discord:

Digital forever......

Another bad move by Blizzard, they'd have to sell nearly as many additional copies on battle.net as they would have on GOG to make up for this, and that's not accounting for the bad PR.

One more reason why we really need some game archiving system

So not only did they take away my legit digital copy of og WC3 and OW1, but now they're taking it off GoG, the one place to play the original?, that's a dick move Blizz.

They've been putting their games on Steam, so it makes zero sense to start delisting games of theirs from GoG, other than to force people into buying the mess of a remaster battlechest on Battlenet.

I've looked into their recent attempts with this Remaster "battlechest", and it's honestly not stellar. It's still riddled with bugs, lower performance, AI upscaled textures/icon art (just why, that's lazy as hell), and then there's their stupid contract for making custom content (because they got salty that Valve got Dota and made Dota 2).

Blizz just isn't learning, like at all, even under MS they are still making so many wrong moves. All I ever wanted was my og WC3 and OW1 copy back, nothing more, nothing less, and I can't even have that...

By that, do you mean a website?, because Nintendo is going around with Sega and taking all those down atm. If they supported an archive system like Steam has (if you've already purchased it, you can always re-download it whenever), it'd only benefit those who already owned the game, not new customers.

Atm we're SoL when it comes to games preservation, since multiple archives are being taken down or bought out, leaving us with GoG as one of the archive clients out there that's fully legal, everything else is apparently "not legal" in the publisher eyes. 

I honestly think we need more anti-trust pushed on the publishers now more than ever.

Douchebag Blizzard strikes again. Based GOG strikes again as well

By that, I mean something akin to what GOG is doing with their GOG Preservation Program, so making sure that the games are still working on newer hardware an OS in their original form (so no remaster or anything that would change programming) even when they're not for sale anymore - and probably also to be able to redownload the games even if they're not offered for sale anymore.

It's basically Steam's deal, meaning it's only ever going to be available to those who already own the game over there. The only difference between Steam/GoG in that same regard, is that GoG will "keep it up to date" (Not really specified if they will keep this updated for future OS's, but I'll have to hold them to that). 

While I do like the approach Steam/GoG do with that, I still want an actual proper archive system that everyone has access to, not just "those who bought X game in 2016-2023", because that's a windowed timespan, and only has a select amount of users with access to said archive. We need an archive that Nintendo and other publishers have zero control over and zero power to disrupt said archive (Yes I know it's IP ownership, but if they are going to straight up neglect and charge for archiving, then that's not really proper archiving and you're just treating it as a means to gouge customers, thus you should lose that power when you do that cough charging for emulation/online check for emulation cough).