This could be the case, or could not be. They shared a post on Reddit 19 hours ago from their official account, and I thought it might be nice to share that here, at least to spark some discussion.
They simply shared a post titled:
Shall we? 📦💿
With the following image:
Link to the Reddit post is here if you want to see what others are saying about it!
They can do this for the upcoming Thief remaster…
I think it would be cool to have physical copies of your fav pc games. I think physical media in general should have a comeback
While this is something I’d love to see I have a hard time fathoming how they could do this to any level of scale. They would have to pick a few games and probably a language or two.
I think GOG would be best suited to just offer cover art as a download and maybe build tools right into GOG galaxy to let you burn games to DVR.
But I do love GOG if I can I always buy through there store front. Sadly it’s rarer then I’d like
please don’t produce more waste
Please don’t team up with Limited Run Games to do this.
Who are they?
A scum company. They got caught using burned CD-Rs for their 3DO games instead of actual pressed discs, insanely long wait times, used to openly cater to scalpers. Insanely expensive for what they offer, and are playing a hand in the death of physical games by creating false scarcity.
mrixrt’s videos on them
If they do that, I’d re-buy all my gog games instantly collectors edition. As long as they have no DRM, no internet requirements and I can play them whenever, wherever, I’m buying.
Gog already are no drm and you could write it to a disc if you really wanted to. It’s been like that for a very long time. Given you would be writing a data disc you can even put multiple games on a single DVD in some cases.
Their windows installers are usually split at 4GB - huh, guess what fits nicely on a 4.7GB DVD…
I know that, but I’d like to buy the cool disk with official box and all that why not.
They could sell decent USB optical drives to go with them
Is there such a thing?
I’ve had a few crappy ones, they’re basically e-waste after a few uses or trips. So I revert to a full size internal sata one or the same but in a 5.1/4" external caddy (powered).
No idea, haven’t used optical media in like 2 decades.
oh right, cool. i’ll stick to my chunky chunks then.
Good idea NGL, won’t mind either way to be honest
Why am I the only one that has a BD-R drive?
There are dozens of us! Dozens!!
You can buy am external DVD burner for like 25 bucks these days, but blue ray is still over a hundred.
It wasn’t until recently. They used to be considerably cheaper.
Sorry. A blue ray BURNER is pretty expensive. A drive is cheap
That’s not why those drives are expensive. They’re expensive because they can run cfw to enable ripping of UHD and now xbox and nintendo discs.
Pretty sure I bought my Blu-ray burners for like $40 long ago
I have one. I rarely use it but I still do occasionally. I’m due a BR dump in the near future actually
do it. I don’t care about the practicality of it all I loved those big boxes. But they also need to have the big manuals inside also.
Some of those manuals were absolutely awesome. Like the one for the first Heavy Gear. or the old flight sim games. Or like the original release of Final Fantasy 7 on PC by Edios came with a brady’s strategy guide. Heck bring back strategy guides too! I remember when World of Warcraft first came out I picked up the strategy guide with it cause it was full of WoW related Penny-Arcade comics in it and I was (heck still am) a massive fan of Penny-Arcade.
What I miss is cloth maps. I don’t know what I did with mine, but if I ever open a moving box and find one, I’m framing it and putting it up on my wall.
yes! the maps were awesome. Or some other stuff you’d get with the game. Like with the first Max Payne you got a really cool mousepad. used that thing for years. Also had one that I believe came with Star Wars Rebel Assault.
100% feel you I miss picking up a game with a phat manual, I am smell the fresh ink from the manuals when I think about it hard enough lol
Or buying a large paged, glossy, color printed, gorgeous strategy guide I would read for pleasure and enjoy as a piece of art as well as a walkthrough
Ahh fuck I miss being younger. The late 90’s and early to mid 2000’s were an incredible time for video games
Maybe for certain Collector’s Editions, but overall I don’t need optical media when the games are DRM-free anyway.
Makes sense to me, actually.
It’d be an easy way to get and also store the DRM-free offline installer, in where you don’t have to permanently allocate active storage to keep the installer around.
burn it yourself
Consumer burnable CD and DVD disks often have an astonishingly short storage life, especially if they are not stored very carefully. They’re not an archival medium. Competently pressed commercial (aluminum) disks meanwhile have a storage life that is near as makes no difference to infinite provided they are not physically damaged in some way.
I’ve got tons of burned disks of pirated old games from the early aughts that don’t read anymore. This is highly annoying from a preservation standpoint as I can’t get them to play despite possessing them on disk, and they’re now unpopular enough that they’re likewise difficult to impossible to pirate again.
i realze now the guy was talking about backup. i thought it was for display. i knew dvds were bad foe navkup but didnt realize commercial dvds were so much better.
EDIT: i just checked they do seel commercial frade “archive quality” on amazon. they arent that mich more.
It would be fucking awesome. I can totally see others doing this in the future but GOG is the perfect player for selling drm-free physical stuff at the moment. People who think “full digital is the inevitabile future everything” are just sad analysts watching their own garden, we already know PS5 selling datas were manipulated from Sony, people need physical like any other art medium.
Optical media? Maybe not.
Custom flash drives? That would be gravy.
You do realize that flash drives are not near stable enough for long term storage, much less archival storage, right?
One time programmable flash could be a good a solution to this
Not to take away form your point at all, but optical media degrades, too. Usually much slower, though. In the long run, regular transferal between backups is the only option. (In the long-long run, we will succeed in preserving nothing and all traces of our existence will be obscured! Ahhh!)
Yes, thats my point.
You have maybe a year, if you’re lucky, on a flash drive… and very few’d probably make it that far, and the ones that did would be egregiously expensive.
on optical media you have time that can be measured in decades, possibly even a century if proper storage practices are used.
That is a significant difference in stability
Ugh, I would love a portable/offline launcher/installer for my GoG game files.
GOG already offers offline installers for all games they sell.
Nice - I didn’t realize that the GoG installer was portable.
I wish their settings had custom connections. Like, If I could have a portable version that connects to my NAS and downloads/installs my offline/saved GoG games; that’d be the sweet spot. If anyone has suggestions for a setup like this lemme know!
I have the offline installer stored on my NAS and use GameVault[1] as a local installed web interface to access my digital game library.
I’d kinda love to see a comeback for optical given the supply issues for flash memory, but I’ll about that a custom USB ROM stick or SDCard style carts for PC would be kinda sick
I interpret it more as preserving those big box games from the past, not releasing new boxes. Riding the current wave for marketing.
PR guy does PR
G*mers who’ve spent two decades buying digital only games and killing brick and mortar stores go mild.
Maybe this is just a ‘thing’ I don’t understand (super likely), why are you censoring ‘gamers’? Or any word on Lemmy? Being a mod here, I can tell you with 100% certainty that if you follow our rules, you don’t have to censor any word you’re using like you have to on TikTok.
there’s an ongoing memetic flashmob-style recurring gag where people pretend that the entire population of gamers are universally so toxic and evil that talking about them is a curse. stereotypes that gamers are racist, misogynistic, etc.
and like, yeah, too many self-avowed gamers ARE toxic in that particular way–the stereotype exists for a reason after all–but i don’t like gatekeeping and the ‘joke’ reeks of it, in that it conveys the implication that playing video games is causative of acquiring fascist views and that if you play video games people will assume you are cultivating a fascist viewpoint and supporting an inherently fascistic and ontologically evil industry, which may cause some people, especially people who are already marginalized, to feel like they are either unwelcome to participate in a recreational activity or that they will be further ostracized for participating in a recreational activity.
i for one would merely like to see people not being discouraged from enjoying stuff, y’know…?
edit:
but i would like to acknowledge that it’s also at least relatively obvious that it’s not actually aimed at literally all people who play video games, but more so at the niche demographic subsection of individuals who identify themselves as Capital-G “Gamers™”, which is a worthwhile distinction.
also … i’ll admit that i’m speaking a little bit from experiences where this has personally affected me due to people assuming I was a self-avowed “Gamer” and projecting upon me a bunch of disgusting political positions that I never have, and never will, endorse. It hurts being accused of doing something that is antithetical to who you are… and I’m sorry to acknowledge that this is quite likely to have tainted my judgment about this ._.
If they do a print to order thing, I could see it maybe working out as a cool side business. Or it could be a chance for them to go really harder into the vintage games market if they can get some publishers on board or get the rights to some older stuff. Doesn’t seem like a winning market though on a mass market front, more just a form of advertising or a specialty service for physical collectors.
Print to order is the best way I was wondering why they “announced” this and then your comment made it click I bet that is how they do it.
Actually super cool I won’t lie.
Anyone know what was up with the Nazi symbolism they emailed purposefully? I would really want to support them but I need to know that it wasnt something terrible they did. Physical releases is definitely a plus as well.
The explanation which makes most sense to me - but which hasn’t been confirmed by GOG - is that the newsletter person did a web search for “slavic emojis”, for which the top hit is a horribly racist website masquerading as an emoji site, which lists all the used glyphs on the first line of the results. (There is no “Slavic” unicode block or anything similar, and the characters used are from Malaysian, Greek and Cameroon script blocks, so not something you’d easily assemble on your own, no matter what your intentions were.)
That site (or at least the users contributing its content) intended all the dog-whistling which was picked up on. However, with a default macOS font installed, the most objectionable “SS” (presented on that site as a single glyph) shows all curly and non-objectionable (5th ‘character’ in the screenshot). So with the newsletter person in a hurry and never scrolling down to the more obviously racist content (or using an AI-assisted interface?), the characters they saw didn’t trigger any alarms. As GOG is perpetually understaffed plus it was a long-weekend, QA was nearly non-existent and communication fumbled.
This was their final apology and communication about it: https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2026/06/c1cdf9fda39aaa5532ee375b38abb04376c7505d.png - so an apology about the newsletter, but nothing about the tone-deaf first followup from the new-on-the-job “community specialist” who was posting the heritage stuff on reddit and ineffectually trying to make sense of the rendering differences without any proper understanding of unicode characters and glyphs and thus muddying the waters further.
They released a standard non-apology claiming it was part of their culture and that people just didn’t understand. They also stated their German team raised issue with the email and that they just ignored it
Wait really?
They went back and forth with the community more and the devs but basically repeated themselves
It was not Nazi symbolism, well not intentionally at least. They used Slavic runes that, in the intended fonts, looks very different from the Nazi symbols. It came to the issue because in some fonts the Slavic runes are displayed without serifs and with hard lines which makes them appear problematic. So it was kind of a self inflicted homographic attack.
Well, I know the cause now but it’s still not that good a reason if they were warned and decided not to use it in Germany…
Oh, it was used in germany, as I as a german had the newsletter in my inbox too, and found it very problematic.
The warning from the german team was not ignored, as far as I understood it, but just arrived too late while the newsletter team was already sending the mails. I also work in a international company with teams all over the world, stuff like that can happen without any ill intend, and so far GOG has shown no negative signs at all. So I tend to accept the explanation that it was only a error, especially with the very bad history that poland had with the nazi regime, Blitzkrieg and all.
Sure one can, and should, put GOG on a personal “watchlist” in case other strange or ugly stuff like this happens, but as long as that is not the case I don’t see any reason to change my use of GOG at all. Humans, and with that companies too, can make and will make errors and I am a big fan of second, or even third, chances. I try to judge by intend not by looks.
The warning from the german team was not ignored, as far as I understood it, but just arrived too late while the newsletter team was already sending the mails.
Nope, it was blocked. They asked, were told this is wrong and knew why.
The reason you had it delivered in Germany is because your email preferences are set to English. They only skipped Germany by blocking the German language. They knew it was wrong, avoided the German language and set it to everyone else. Rather than hitting backspace once or twice.
My preference are not set to english, but GOG sometimes things I am in France and from time to time sends me Mails in that undecipherable language so who knows what happened exactly in my case and why I got the mail.
But even with all that information I still classify it as a badly managed marketing stunt then a right wing outing or something like that. Nothing else they do, as far as I know, shows any signs of that.
Except their excuse that it was part of their culture and why they use it in the first place holds no water according to the developers of the game (part of said culture) as well as many others.
Well the games name is “End of the Sun” and it is a Slavic game, so using a slavic sun rune is not that extremely far fetched. Why using it double, which lead to the SS appearance, i``s another question and it was dumb at least. But I still don’t see ill intent, when something like that happens once I am fair enough to accept that people can do things in error. I still try to see the good in people
I can’t find a official statement from GOG with that content, only statements where they say that it was a error both in the internal processes, with not waiting for the responses of all internationale, especially in this case the german, teams before sending the newsletter and with checking if the runes could be problematic in some fonts.
The runes themself are both from the intended design and from the connected meaning and symbolism unproblematic, yes they can look problematic in the wrong fonts but that is more a problem of font design then of ill intent.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/1txmcyd/comment/opxtour/?share_id=CwegTdIv6g3YU-MQmBT0_
Second sentence is literally the GOG rep stating is part of their culture. The reply is the dev explicitly stating they avoided several of the runes sent because of the connotations. Comments are full of people pointing out that they did not use the rune they claimed they did based on the Unicode and pointing out that in history using the double rune has had no meaning.
The developers also pointed out in a different spot they changed their logo because the old one had connotations they wanted to avoid but that GOG used the old one, despite having the new less problematic one.
Nothing GOG said passes the sniff test.
I agree, the combination of the incorrect character, the “random” doubling of it and the way they did not respect the developer’s decision to change their logo makes it hard to believe it was a mistake.
To me it really sounds like the change of logo made some piece of shit angry, and then they thought they’d “correct” it.
I don’t think we should create more waste in our world, so I’m voting against it.
I’d want GOG to focus more on Linux and on getting more games on their store.
Those would be collectibles, and as that more or less art pieces, so not really waste, unless you classify all art as waste which would be sad in my eyes.
I understand this.
Still plastic waste is a huge problem.
Dependeing on the price, anyone could be tempted by collecting these, where collecting psintings would be too prohibitive.
collecting psintings would be too prohibitive.
i mean i did run out of wall space two paintings ago, but that’s what local art fairs and farmers markets are for. plus you get to meet the artist.
my favorite painting cost $60
Such boxes are made mostly of cardboard, the amount of plastic is rather low even more so should they leave out discs, by replacing them with flash storage for example.
Every time I read this fake ecological motivation I aks myself why people think we can save the planet without some plastic and paper in a little box of human art, instead of considering real problems like big industry procedures and food packaging. Priorities.
I’m a vegetarian, using my muscular bike a lot and trying to buy as much local food as possible, so I’m trying to do what I can.
I’m sorry if I offended people, by saying these physical dics would be an ecological problem for me. I agree that just a few people would probably buy them and it wouldn’t be a big deal.
It’s just that, as long as we have a DRM free digital games, I don’t really see what physical games would bring except easier resale (and collection/decoration).
If it helps GOG bring better features and games, I’m not really against it then, even if I wouldn’t buy their physical games.
