I'm starting this off with saying that I have purchased a great deal of games here on GOG for the past 2 years that I've been a member, about 372 games are listed on my GOG library. Now what I've noticed is that some games have compatibility issues with certain newer drivers (Mostly it doesn't support Intel chips and newer AMD/ATI drivers but Rayman 2 doesn't work with new NVidia drivers last time I checked) and a nice amount of games don't have Windows 8 support.

What I am asking is in the future when you cannot possibly downgrade your drivers and when Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 (Windows 7 user myself) has become obsolete, will GOG had support for those future drivers and OS's? I know that they have added MAC release for a lot of games and recently for the D&D games and Linux is coming fall. Mostly I'm worried it won't happen for some of them as there are some games with no big popularity like Soulbringer and Speed Busters listed with Windows 8 support and I'm worried that I won't be able to play them in the future when I don't have Windows 7 anymore.

Thank you for your time. :)

GOG is probably better than most digital distributors out there in terms of support and they have the most expertise with making older games work.

If it's possible to make those game work in a cost-effective manner, I'm sure they will.

That being said, I also strongly suspect that short of releasing an extremely faithful Windows emulator (the legal hurdles alone might not make this feasible), some of these games might not be salvageable in the long run. Installing an aging version of Windows on a virtual machine might open some doors, although GOG could not legally package this with their games. It's something you'd have to do on your own.

But cheer up, all is not lost. GOG announced upcoming Linux support and given that Linux is open-source, that issue will be greatly mitigated for Linux games.

I have no worries about compatibility with gog games. Now old games on steam is a bitch I have a few that won't work at all and I doubt they even attempt to work on.

GOG will figure something out. The more they expand, the more ability they have to program for the future. Though at the end of the day, certain games are just really whiny.

Most older games run flawlessly under Linux and wine. So I guess we can have that as an alternative. As for Windows, I'll stick to 7 for as long as humanly possible.

Now what we need is Wine for WIndows. Oftentimes games who utilize hacks (e.g. not just following an API but finding quirks to use) in the name of an effect or performance or similar, will tend to break with newer versions of drivers and frameworks.

What made Windows so popular for gaming was stuff like DirectX and a common driver structure. Now if a developer gets a game working as desired using not quite nice methods, stuff starts breaking. This is seen both in windows as well as older dos games (though DOS did even less of trying to discourage devs from doing so).
With updates of DirectX, more secure architecture limiting interaction on processes. Graphics cards/drivers which deprecate or neglect older API calls in favor of stability/features/security...well things will likely break. Copy protection is a huge pain because they usually tend not to play nice with established API.

What I'm getting at here is: some games code to standards. Some games use quirks which might get fixed. And some rely on some functionality which gets killed off because of security concerns.

As to Gog.com. I trust them better to support the old games catalogue than any other site to buy games on. Steam will, and has, released older games which will not run on modern systems. Unlike Steam Gog offers a money back guarantee if you buy a game you can't run (I think I read this anyway).

But yeah. What we need is Wine for Windows. Something in DirectX changed and now sound/graphics/input works incorrectly? Well a different directX dll could act like the older version towards the game, and still play nice with the modern OS. This is exactly what Wine does, letting the program think it's working with a(n older) version of windows .dll's and have the wrapper talk to the OS/Hardware of today. But likely it won't happen in the immediate future. But hey, it might at some point. Windows XP has just been retired. What about all the older business applications which won't work on vista/7/8 (what's this about DEP or not just allowing users to write anywhere?), Someone might actually start a project based solely on this...but I wouldn't hold my breath. Some actually work better and have more features. Sandboxing making sure they don't mess with the other applications. Allowing windowed mode was just perfect for me in the games I tried some years back. Running Jagged Alliance 2 and Neighbours from Hell in windowed mode, without having to change away from 32-bit colours? Nope Windows can't, but Wine provides this functionality.

So basically I might have to switch over to Linux in the future for some of the older games? I don't mind that but as Blotunga says I will also stick with Windows 7 as long as I can.

Well, older games from the Windows era will remain stuck with Windows, virtualization non-widthstanding (ie, old version of Windows running on top of something else).

However, next generation games that were programmed with a Linux version will age more gracefully in terms of compatibility, because even if Linux changes radically within the next 15 years and the dev stops supporting his Linux game, GOG will legally be able to ship games with a tweaked old version of Linux or more probably, an old version of Linux running on top of a virtual machine (there's already a virtualization engine build-in the Linux kernel).

Dosbox takes care of about 98% of Dos games, so no worries on that side. And on other fronts some significant progress has been made in the past year or two, so apart from some really hard eggs I think we can be safe to assume backward compatibility shouldn't be a problem for the foreseeable future.

The extremely few times I had a problem with a game on GOG, I fixed it myself in like 10 minutes . It's not that complicated if your google-fu is strong .

I would not worry that much. As long as there are fans of those old games out there, there are people that will take up the challenge getting them to run on modern OSes.

Also, while I'm really no fan of Valve/Steam because they encourage DRM, the Steam Machine concept might bring the breakthrough of Linux as an end user system. AAA titles that want to be sold for those machine will have native Linux support making the OS more attractive in turn. On the other hand many people are not happy with where Microsoft is going at the moment (even if they "revoked" some things with Windows 8.1).

And with Linux becoming a valid option for the dedicated gamer, as some people already noted, it will be easier to emulate an environment for older games. Wine ftw.

Thank you for posting this. I have some of the same concerns myself about GOG games working (or not working) on Windows 8 and later.