I've been thinking... It all started with wanting ot play good old games right? And wanting to preserve them. DRM-free, working on modern systems. But what about the bad games? Are they also worth preserving? Would you buy them?

Sure, "good" and "bad" are subjective terms. What I mean are games like Hellboy: Dogs of Night, Destiny of the Doctors, Miami Vice - stuff that's almost universaly recognised as bad, but is notable either precisely because of how bad it is (like Daiktana seems to be) or because it represents a setting or license otherwise rarely (or never) present in games.

I don't mean those particular game neccesairly, I'm just in general curious if you'd be interested in some infamous old titles enough to actually buy them here. Because I'm asking myself that and I'm not sure. As a fan I'm very curious of the Hellboy game for example, but on the other hand, would I really spend money on a bad gamei nstead of a good one just because I'm curious?

If they play badly then I doubt I'd buy them anywhere. :-) If you're thinking in terms of wanting to digitally preserve the "history of games" of lesser popular old titles, I always thought that stuff was ultimately left to "Abandonware" sites precisely because when they don't sell them they don't need to curate only the profitable / popular ones.

I suppose for those wanting a "digital only" collection there may be some curiosities, personally speaking though I have hundreds of disc games (including quite a few quirky ones I've never seen mentioned here) and the issue with many of them is rights - if GOG still can't get popular ones like Lemmings, etc, then imagine the many lesser popular DOS, shareware, etc, developers that went out of business 20 years ago, are no longer in the business and can't even be contacted. A lot of games good, bad and neutral alike will probably remain disc only / Abandonware for that reason.

Good question.
Speaking for myself (and knowing that defining a good game can sometimes be subjective) I think that's it's very possible that I'd buy several "Bad Old Games" here if they were sold for less than 5$. I think I've already bought plenty of bad games on GOG so maybe I'd buy some more, yes :P

I also played Hellboy many years ago. The game came free with a magazine and it was probably so good that I can't remember anything about it, except it being 3D

Yeah, but because it's a legal grey (at best) zone, it's questionable how permanent such preservation would be. Also, GOG sell old games easy and ready to run on modern systems. As far as I understand abandonware sites will provide you with the game's files, but you'll have to make it run yourself. Sometimes that's relatively easy even for a dumbass like me, but sometimes not so much.

Game preservation is not a commercial endeavor - I doubt anyone would bring the likes of Atari ET here. That being said, even bad games have fans - I am one of the few people who actually somewhat enjoyed playing Daikatana (though I admit it has its horribly bad parts).

But, to answer your question, I'd have to be attached to a "bad game" to buy it again if it showed up here. If it's just a bad game I never heard of, meh.

Insert "it's in the name" meme: Good Old Games :P.

Not going to buy them myself (my comparatively modest library already causes me anxiety anyway). But I still think it's good if they're available here. There's a hilarious playthrough of Cyberia (which imo is a pretty bad game) by some gaming mag people on Youtube, for something like that those bad old games need to be easily playable.

I certainly have a morbid curiosity here and there, certainly enough to want to buy some and check it out.
The 5th Element for example.

There could also be a few older games that got pretty bad/mediocre reviews because, at the time, they "didn't offer anything new" or "lacked innovation". But that's not necessarily a bad thing now. For example Dune 2000 got pretty scathing reviews at the time because it seemed like it used an obsolete rts formula. But of course it matters little now that a 1998 rts plays like a 1995 rts.

There are games that are like movies that fall in the "It's so bad it's good" camp.

Ride to Hell: Retribution is a bad game but people still play it for how absurd it can be or to see how they can break the game.

In general you're right, game preservation is not a commercial endeavor. But some games, exactly like ET, are famous precisely because of their reputation for being terrible and thus may be profitable to sell. Think of a movie like Showgirls, a famously bad movie, one of the "bad movies" one could say, but that fame turned eventualy into a profitable one on home video.

There are several already in the catalogue (with hopefully as many as possible to be included in the future), so why stop there?
"The more the merrier", "one man's trash is another man's treasure", and all that.

If a game is truly bad, I'm not sure I would really want to play it long enough to justify a purchase. More than likely, I would only want to dabble around briefly just to see how bad the game is.

But I still think all games, even really bad ones, should be preserved. Maybe such games could be set up in a sort of "digital museum" type of service where a single monthly subscription would provide unlimited access to a library of unpopular, esoteric or just really bad games. Sure, you would only have access during your subscription, but the intention is that you'd probably never want to access these games again anyway. Think of it more like paying an entrance fee to visit a museum or an exhibit, rather than purchasing a product. Or doing Netflix for a month and binge watching all the cheap sci-fi or horror movies you never would have watched in the theater or bought/rented individually.

You can find cyberpunk splashed all across the site, how bad do you want to go? Heck I would rather dig ET up out of the desert, on my own with my bare hands and no water, then play it repeatedly whilst being forced to listen to our Eurovision entry, than play cyberpunk for a single minute.

I politely disagree given the current store functionality.

It's not in the best interests of a private corporation to archive games out of goodwill unless it's profitable to do so. Nor do I trust any for-profit company to do it, since there's a chance they'll always plug the plug on it whenever they want or if they go bankrupt. If there's fan demand for cult classics, exceptions can be made for novelty or pop culture significance like your Daikatana example and Arabian Nights, but it should have a "cult classic" filter that the GOG store is missing.

Abandonware is already being archived and hosted by governmental archive bodies and non-profits like The Internet Archive and other museums. So that's who I'll go to if I want to experience those 'bad' games.

On a side rant, I'd rather the copyright system cut unclaimed abandonware's copyright duration and let it enter the public domain quicker so it's not stuck in legal limbo. This encourages corporations to have clear ownership so fans know who to bug about remasters and remakes. And at the same time, letting more works the public domain becomes an immensely rich source of ideas and culture to draw upon for new IPs (p.24) and by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Sequelitis is an issue in the video game industry because it's very risky to create new IPs on newer hardware, which is why licensing, buying IP, and letting indie studios absorb all the risks is so prevalent in this industry.

- People who want GOG to do game preservation: yes
- People who like some of those specific "bad" games: yes
- Everyone else: don't care / no
Can you mark my post as best answer? :-P I'm pretty sure that there's no such thing. You might mean games that are very unpopular and/or have received many bad reviews?

I buy pretty much any RPG from my "era" of playing them (1994ish to today). Even if I only load them up for a few hours of reminiscing or curiosity I love that genre enough it is worth it to me. I assume there are people who feel that way about other genres as well. Hopefully we make it profitable enough to encourage preservation.