We keep hearing influencers and journalists talking about the various ways games companies screw over their customers. Yet, here we are, and Blizzard is alive and well, and the complaining continues. Is it that gamers like getting abused or is the drama exaggerated?
At the same time, maybe people do like being abused even if they won’t admit if it means going back to the brands that gave them the dopamine hits early on. There aren’t enough substitutes out there for most to walk away.
Have you tried replaying it? You can't even RMB to move units, you need to click the move icon then select where.
Warcraft 2 does not (imho), and last time I tried it, Warcraft 2 BNE still worked just fine, so that's probably getting shut down now.
... but perhaps more people will try to help out fixing those bugs, purely out of spite.
No thanks Blizzard, my soundcard works perfectly.
seeing as they just released the remastered version.
though it can still be picked up for free on various abandonware sites and archive
I think with hard copies going away, the ability to make backups of what you buy should be protected by law, at least for software that is no longer supported (of course one side effect is that all games become services, but there have been single player games recently that prove it's still a good business model).
We have seen enough cases of how digital copies are ultimately a way for companies to "erase history", so to speak, and this is detrimental not just to consumers but the wider culture. Hard copies was a way to guard against this, but ultimately it is all software anyway, and digital copies should provide a way to truly own what you buy (if it's a one time buy product).
I wouldn't discourage people from buying owned copies, especially when they can find an option free of DRM
So I guess we're stuck with personally avoiding DRMed (including online only) media, and supporting the likes of EFF, GoG, and https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
See also :
https://technologizer.com/2012/01/23/why-history-needs-softw...
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/piracy-preservation-and-the...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/17/taiwanese-horr...
> Almost 10,000 negative reviews soon flooded the game’s review page. The developer, Red Candle Games, posted an apology saying it was “purely an accident” that the poster was left in the game.
10,000 negative reviews is wild for something so banal. I can't imagine defending a politician over what might be the mildest insult ever conceived.
Old Russian joke about insulting Reagan in front of the kremlin etc.
It's unfathomable that anyone anywhere has "loyalty" to any politician. They are just doing a job - what do they need loyalty for? Especially from the electorate.
Obviously in this case it was most likely bot farm, but given 1,4 billion Chinese population I wouldn’t be surprised over a couple hundred million brainwashed to the point of frenzy.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/im-loyal-to-nothing-except-the...
Imagine the poster unironically showed Trump dressed up to resemble Abraham Lincoln, and praised him as the great leader of USA. Or some such.
Imagine what would happen in the reviews then.
However, if someone discovered something like this in a game that I own and called everyone to add bad reviews and others have been at work bashing the product... I'd probably say "meh" and not do anything.
I find a line between these and while it's clear for me, I cannot put into words exactly why. Am I counting on the actions of others? Not sure.
Now we have an ecosystem of very political communities online that expand into social media, games, news and even travel, and they are getting bigger. Would harsh reactions make everything better or worse? I don't know the answer but I follow my gut feeling and just ignore them.
Myself, if I saw a game insulting something or someone I'm emotionally attached to, I'd probably roll my eyes and continue or uninstall, depending on how my mood is ruined. I might think less of whoever put the insult there (or allowed it to stay), too. But many, many others would, unfortunately, voice their disdain more directly.
I picked Trump as an example because, whatever you think about him, it should be easy for us in the West to imagine people going overboard in defending/dissing him too, because that has been, and is, repeatedly happening in plain sight for many years now. In this sense, it's the same reaction as 'cocacola1 is failing to understand.
One thousand British people downvoting something that mocks, say, Boris Johnson seems very plausible, even those Johnson is unpopular and the UK population is less than a tenth the size of China.
Companies like Activision, Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft can do outright horrible things and you'll be sitting by quitely, but god forbid someone like GoG shows up with an idea to fix something and you tear into them just because they didn't solve all the worlds political problems at once.
Of course Microsoft is guilty of removing the Tiananmen Square massacre result from Bing on an anniversary of that event. Did they ever explain why that happened? I think not.
Unfortunately, very few (non-giant) developers still let you buy and download DRM-free games from their own websites, and so far, as far as I am aware of, GoG is still the least bad option for the others (there's also the likes of Matrix-Slitherine and itch.io, but they are much more niche).
Worth noting that even if it will no longer be available for sale, they will still keep it updated for people who already bought it.
That's not worth much. They don't even maintain the games that are still for sale on GOG. Try playing Tales of Monkey Island; most of the cutscenes won't run.
But we know they don't honor that policy.
What would you conclude?
How do you think that actually works out? For games that are sold for usually less than 15 bucks?
I believe what _I_ said about it, personally, was "that's not worth much" (because they don't do it).
Would be helpful if you've linked to that policy :)
They do update some of the classics, that's true. Expecting them to fix bugs in every single game on the store is madness. They do have tech support that you can reach out to and they refund games if they don't work for you. That's as much as one can expect.
> Even if the game is older than you are, we test it thoroughly, fix all the bugs, and apply patches so it runs flawlessly on your next-gen PC and on modern OSs.
The actual policies are here: https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/categories/201526109-Polici...
My GOG account broke somehow almost 10 years ago, and over the years and several attempts they have been unable to recover it. They can't even establish why it's broken or what games I owned or if the whole thing has been irrecoverably lost.
Now, I have to weigh the calculus: do I buy the games just because, knowing there is basically zero chance I boot them up? What if that was Blizzard's end game -to drive scarcity?
That's nothing special to game companies. All entertainment companies are the same way. That's why they push for longer and longer copyrights. Copyright is what protects Disney from having to compete with its own past work.
They have shown themselves to be bad curators of their own catalogue, so I bought a copy to avoid having issues during some possible future point when I just want to experience some nostalgia.
but now i'm not just snagging a file, i'm creating an entire workflow. i'll just pay for the actual, clean binary
The impact they've had on bundled malware in pirated copies of their games can not be overstated.
It might be the only way to legally "own" the game but if we want to blur that then it's pretty easy to get in possession of the files.
> there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes
Fuck DRM and fuck Blizzard. Kudos to everyone involved in games and film preservation during this hostile era.
Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM.
I buy all games on GoG when I can, especially classic games, but new ones as well. It's so nice to just have a collection of DRM-free installers, and be able to support a company that does right by the classic games.
Oh, Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs.
I tried AoE 3 on Steam (demo). It was a total disaster. Downloading was slow and then the game: At the first start would not let me build barracks (no suitable place found).
At the second start it was hard to found the baracks again (all icons look the same - Windows style enshitification) but the peasants will not harvest berry bushes.(bugs) They made the UI much worse. The playground is round. The icons look the same so one has to look at tooltips to build a house. All in all a crappy experience. I guess i will stick with AoE 2.
In the past I would have complained, but as someone that has foolished invested into UWP and WinRT siren song, I can't but fully agree.
Maybe companies should consider limiting their growth to stay nimble enough to provide value and stay viable. Maybe they do more good by being good at what they do than by chasing peak profit and diminishing their brands. Either way, Bobby Kotick was a bad CEO.
* The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was public
* real id debacle
* Diablo 3
* shutting down blizzard north, despite working on d3
* spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump
* x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled
* spent years trying to create a dedicated moba, and hots came out after the hype of the genre was gone
* Cancelling semi-experimental games (the Warcraft Point'n Click Adventure game, the Starcraft: Ghost game, and many others[1])
I'm sure there are more issues/fuck ups blizzard did, the point though is that the company couldn't adapt to the new norms of the industry (some are excusable due to the fuck you money wow gives) and thus became the black sheep.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1ft4...
Certain games on that list tbf is way past 2008.
If they had released it 5 years earlier it might have allowed the genre to stick to the huge cultural legacy it had, at least in Korea.
Let alone the fact that the story of Starcraft 2 was... white-washed entirely compared to the OG & Brood Wars.
Was worth it though. SC2 was the last of the old, great Blizzard
Activision Blizzard was 2008. Shutting Blizzard North was 2005.
So indeed it seems it was rotting before official Vivaldi-Activision merger.
I think, just like with Starcraft, you misread the situation with "hype of the genre was gone" about moba. I think Blizzard was very good at creating extremely polished products, but LoL already was polished and well established.
Project Titan's assets were used in Overwatch, but yeah, spending so much time on a big project to abandon it really shows poor management skills and overall bad design of the project.
If like HotS and Diablo 3 it came out much earlier it would've kept the RTS genre most likely alive (only revived interest in AoE 2 started to get the ball rolling for RTS again).
Not only that but Blizzard had since WC3 tried to create their own MOBA and stalled time and time again, they announced Blizzard All-star while announcing SC2, only for HotS to be announce after Dota 2 had left beta & LoL was already moving away from static MOBA design to the more "skill based" design they currently got.
Especially if the rumor that icefrog (last dev of Dota) approached Blizzard and Blizzard said no, it's the most obvious act of stupidity Blizzard did.
By the time HotS was out it was dead in the water because it had no competing feature setting it apart from the competition:
* if you wanted micromanaged static MOBA: Dota 2
* If you wanted a 3rd person shooter MOBA: Smite
* If you wanted a "skill based" dynamic and more casual MOBA: LoL
HotS tried to mimic LoL which meant an already watered down MOBA being further watered down.
Hearthstone is a good example of how Blizzard's games could have looked have they timed their releases better and stopped with "fold it 3000 times", since you can only do this if the game's budget is a typical 90s game budget or you've got alternative income sources & isn't publicly owned i.e. Valve.
Static? Dota 2 is not a dynamic game? Not why wdym by "micromanaged" - Meepo, Nature prophet?
> * If you wanted a 3rd person shooter MOBA: Smite
Paragon?
> HotS tried to mimic LoL
Completely different games, hots feels more like a team based game compared to Dota 2 or Lol because it has shared experience + no gold + no items - so the gap between a good and a bad player is not that visible compared to Dota2/Lol where you can abandon your team for 20-30 minutes and then destroy everyone
Never got on with them or really understood the appeal, despite loving RTS and ARPGs.
Dota 2 afaik still relies heavily on static effects such as on click effects rather than LoL where it's mostly just a matter of "skill" based abilities.
>Completely different games, hots feels more like a team based game compared to Dota 2 or Lol because it has shared experience + no gold + no items - so the gap between a good and a bad player is not that visible compared to Dota2/Lol where you can abandon your team for 20-30 minutes and then destroy everyone
HotS is a watered down version of LoL, it doesn't mean it's bad it just means it could never compete to garner the same audience when we already have "Dota 2 for big brain people, LoL for casual people".
Our problem with it ultimately became the drudgery. We wanted more game modes, some wacky whimsical arcade-like stuff. It's been a while and my memory isn't great in terms of the timeline but I think eventually they did add something like that? Can't remember but basically we gave up on the game because there was no gameplay experience diversity; stuff was more or less the same.
...and then they abandoned it... :(
HOTS is still a beautiful and well-made game though. To this day.
But RTS was only in a slump in the sense that the apex of the popularity of that genre was around the turn of the millennium (which probably was unavoidable).
And only a few years before SC2 released we've got the likes of Dawn of War 1 and Supreme Commander 1, and, last but not least : the amateur-made Spring(-Recoil) games, which put almost every other RTS game to shame, so advanced they were in comparison (and, sadly, still are, when you look at today's player's first impressions of BAR, despite it mostly only having improved in the graphics and performance department, as the 'R' suggests).
Compared to Spring games, Starcraft 2 looked like a very solid and polished, but also very safe and almost obsolete game.
I mean Supreme Commander has an active community despite coming out 3 years earlier, with less hype, and from a company that has long died.
Starcraft 2 had a nice campaign, but it really felt like Starcraft 1.5. Never really elevated the genre. SupCom really did.
Have you played Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander? Those increased the scale, the tactics, the map size. The weapons felt more varied. Really, made SC 1 & 2 feel rather Mickey Mouse.
Jason Schreier's recent book covers some of the game cancellations. The Warcraft adventure game was cancelled after they flew out one of the best designers in the genre for a week to try to make it work, and make it fun, and couldn't. It was a game that was outsourced to a different company, and they didn't feel like it was up to their quality standards to ship. Shutting down Blizzard North came about as a consequence of the distance between them and HQ, leading to a different studio culture that became difficult to manage, and the uncontested resignation of Blizzard North's executive team when they tried to make demands from Blizzard's owners, Vivendi.
Polygon [1] covered the Starcraft: Ghost game. Long story short, it got canned because it was in development hell for too long. Originally under development by a studio in the Bay area, there apparently wasn't a dedicated Blizzard producer to the game for the longest time, and the idea of what it should be kept changing as new games came out and HQ wanted them to copy those ideas. At some point, Blizzard shifted development to a different studio just miles away from them because they wanted multiplayer, but the same issues persisted. And then they released WoW, which consumed all of their attention. With the release of the gen 7 consoles around the corner, requiring further investment, they made the sensible choice to shelve it so they could focus their time and money on their new cash-printing machine instead.
Experimentation is important for finding the fun, and cancelling what isn't working is a required part of the process. And while, yes, there's a ton of games in the Blizzard graveyard, they're no exception. Valve has a list of cancelled games that's probably just as long. And they're all the better for it. Titan died in favor of Overwatch, Nomad died in favor of World of Warcraft.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2016/7/5/11819438/starcraft-ghost-wh...
At the expense of being treated almost as bad as people treat activision.
>It has certainly missed a lot of opportunities, such as turning BattleNet into a public digital storefront before Steam, or capitalizing on the MoBA genre that spawned from their own games before competitors did, but I doubt that they would have had as much success even if they did because their approach would have been different.
Afaik they never tried to compete with Valve with a Steam alternative shop, this only came about way later with Activision releasing their games onto BattleNet platform.
>Jason Schreier's recent book covers some of the game cancellations. The Warcraft adventure game was cancelled after they flew out one of the best designers in the genre for a week to try to make it work, and make it fun, and couldn't. It was a game that was outsourced to a different company, and they didn't feel like it was up to their quality standards to ship. Shutting down Blizzard North came about as a consequence of the distance between them and HQ, leading to a different studio culture that became difficult to manage, and the uncontested resignation of Blizzard North's executive team when they tried to make demands from Blizzard's owners, Vivendi.
Outsourcing those games was then the issue, they should've either done it in-house or tried to work with a more well known company, since afaik it wasn't exactly done by LucasArts or Seria but the same studio who did the Zelda games made for the Philips CD-i.
Same thing goes with SC: Ghost, and as you point out it was rife with mistakes that screwed it all up.
>Experimentation is important for finding the fun, and cancelling what isn't working is a required part of the process. And while, yes, there's a ton of games in the Blizzard graveyard, they're no exception. Valve has a list of cancelled games that's probably just as long. And they're all the better for it. Titan died in favor of Overwatch, Nomad died in favor of World of Warcraft.
I agree to an extent, you can experiment as much as you want, but if it keeps on happening without much change within the company, there's probably something systemically wrong within the company, which was the case for quite some time with Blizzard.
The overall situation was multifacted, but my takeaway is that Blizzard's recent failures come down to two main themes:
* World of Warcraft's success gave the company unrealistic expectations of what a successful "normal" game looked like, and
* "When it's ready" covers up the sins of a company that never quite figured out project management.
My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.
Activision's influence didn't help, and it imposed a tighter focus on prompt monetary return after Titan's cancellation. That clashed with the long development cycles of even the successful projects.
- Youtuber X has a runaway successful video/s.
- Seeing the cashflow from that video, they think "Hey, I could probably duplicate this!"
- When that duplication fails, they decide "You know what, maybe I just need to make a lot of videos"
- When that doesn't bring in the expected income and/or leads to burnout they think "You know what, I think I need some outside help to make me see my blindspots".
And, of course, invariably when that outside help comes in, so does the slop. The outside help does not care about quality, they care about getting money in through the door. That often involves hack and slashing all efforts at quality, shilling out endlessly, and some real questionable decisions when it comes to employment.
Now, of course, the creator is still responsible for what their company becomes. But, money is money and a creator/owner is just more likely to like easymode income (for themselves) vs duplicating the efforts of a prior period.
- Other people writing scripts, recording gameplay and other stuff.
It's a different series today.
Going over budget and going over scope can only happen depending on who is measuring. I can spend 6 months developing a part of a game and not consider it a waste of time or out of scope. I’m of the mind that this was the natural state of Blizzard prior to Activision.
I mean, they are fundamentally making things that roughly sound like this - we are all going to sit around on a server and pretend to have a giant adventure
Ridiculous, the very concept is out of scope lol. You simply can’t have the wrong minded people involved in this process, certainly not the wrong project managers. You can’t even have the wrong parent company for a pursuit like this.
- x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled
Overwatch came out of that and it was one of the biggest game in the last 15years. It sold over 50m copies, an insane number.
What if Overwatch would've been a huge failure? Would we still vindicate Blizzard's failed 2nd MMO?
No argument with your other points though :)
Unfortunately the expectation for modern games is this near infinite scope which requires several years to complete and way too much money. If your game is required to be this large then you either need a huge team or decades of time from a small time.
So I believe that the larger the game the more likely it is going to be devoid of passion and artistic value. I'd prefer game studios to split up into many smaller studios and make more smaller games.
But their treatment of Warcraft III opened my eyes - the company I fell I love with that produced quality games no matter what does not exist anymore.
So long and thanks for all the murlocs…
Overwatch launched, for pay, I believe at $39.99 USD. It was very fun very micro-transactions are optional and purely cosmetic game. I bought it day one.
Then they saw the success of PUBG and Fortnite's season passes and decided "we want some of that" and launched Overwatch 2 going so far as locking entire characters behind micro-transactions.
The day they launched Overwatch 2, they entirely shut down the Overwatch 1 servers. Something they had said earlier on that they were not going to do, before they later changed course. They took away the game I loved, the game I paid for, and replaced it with a junky free-to-play game dancing around in its skin like Edgar the Bug in Men in Black, all "Look at me, I'm still Overwatch, pinky promise", but anyone with a sense of taste can tell it really isn't. They ruined it.
Literally all my friends played Overwatch. My wife was in an Overwatch League. I don't know a single person who stuck with Overwatch 2 for more than a couple weeks. My wife's entire league just shut down.
I hear people play it but I sure don't know anyone. I would estimate mostly people who never played the original? Left such a sour taste in my mouth that I am hesitant to ever give Blizzard money again.
Basically she was on a non-professional all woman team for almost six years that would go head-to-head with other teams in scheduled tournaments. Her team even managed to get one-on-one coaching from some guy on the actual official "Overwatch League".
They dissolved shortly after Overwatch 2 came out. The move to 5v5 did not help as suddenly one of their tanks was redundant.
This is so sad to read. :(
Grassroot competition like that is the basis on which esports scene thrives...
Blizzard really wrote down the manual of everything you shouldn't do to make a game into an "esport", from the competition structure and insane costs (remember the initial slots for a league that hadn't had its first season yet was between $2 and $15 millions...), to the game balance which led to one meta destroying interest completely for way too long, making an entire role useless in the process, and the list continues.
There are still a few skins you can't realistically unlock without paying; but that doesn't ruin a game. Overwatch in its current state is great.
When they not only killed the original Overwatch but also suddenly decided to abandon the PvE component, it was a double whammy which resulted in us instantly abandoning what had been a regular staple of our gaming time. We moved on to other things such as Deep Rock Galactic and haven't looked back.
Blizzard basically ignored Overwatch 1 (except for lootboxes) for the last half of its life.
Players would have paid for maps, paid for expansions, paid for spectating the overwatch league, paid for spectating their favorite yt personalities commentary, but nope, they promised some fever dream single player which went nowhere.
AoE2 is slowly losing its uniqueness with each update.
The new matchmaking sucks, can no longer select which map to play on ranked, pathing is broken in new ways.
Don’t get me wrong, the new civilisations are nice, just kind of hoped they wouldn’t have done a total revamp.
They also added easier ways to do things which were giving competitive edge to the players who could efficiently do them the hard-way, perhaps reducing the motivation to train further for the top players (why train to do hard tricks if they could be automated by the game later).
I didn't know AoE2 was getting content updates or balancing. I thought it was the same game, locked in. I notice aoe4 has seasons and rebalancing... Not sure how to feel about it.
I can also tell you, since there is a whole new generation of gamers out there who have practiced countless hours of various games, the game play and what is a n00b has dramatically changed. Plus us old timers are really good as well.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/1gr3win/how_to_m... They had images like that on their website but removed them later.
1. It changed the ToS so Blizzard owns the IP rights to any third-party maps, effectively killing this community. Why? Because of Dota 2. There was a customm mode called Defense of the Ancients ("Dota") that somebody took and basically created the MOBA genre. Blizzard decided to sue and lost. They tried to create their own (ie Heroes of the Storm) but the space came to be dominated by League of Legends. Blizzard didn't want a repeat of that. Ridiculous; and
2. WC3 Reforged ("Refunded" as it was commonly called on release) also made the original game worse even if you didn't have Reforged. The game downloaded a bunch of assets you didn't use. It broke compatibility with some maps. I think there were a bunch of other problems too.
More [1]. Some of these might've been fixed by later updates now.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/exav5v/just_a_list_of_...
> GOG [...] suddenly finds itself with a new policy to figure out. So GOG is putting the Warcraft I & II Bundle on sale (discount code "MakeWarcraftLiveForever" for $2 off) and is letting folks know that if they buy it before December 13, they will keep access to it after the delisting, complete with offline installers.
That's not a new policy. That's their existing policy with no changes.
Though they're giving the company much gentler treatment than they used to. When Duke Nukem got pulled, GOG put it on giveaway.
People still play DotA forks and successors, but the RTS genre kind of ended with wc3.
On the other, huge companies that could do better throw out an AI upscale, more or less, and that seems to be what this turned out to be: https://youtu.be/KZ9Ac4WVW6Q?si=9Wzjxl0Mkh4t3nMG
Too bad from a company that was once one of THE names in game development and often delaying shipping until the product was ‘right’.
I already have WC2 on GoG and this preservation program commitment makes me think I should start ramping up buying other games from my childhood with GoG.
I understand it’s an old game, but these parts seem like pure laziness. I’m sure this laziness costs them a lot of players who leave the initial mission in disgust and never get to see the beautiful parts of WoW.
And every expansion was just a nightmare start, without being able to get to the new zone, servers again crashing.
You just have golden memories of a state that never happened. Game wise, WoW has gone forward a lot since DF (the disaster of SL taught them something) and is actually in a lot better state than before. Sure, it has bugs, but it's also a massive game. And they do keep fixing a lot of bugs with quite good response time these days instead of what it used to be.
The idea of not being able to purchase older titles in a legitimate way only encourages piracy, yet if it will squeeze an extra few pennies out for shareholders, it seems like the right move.
The games industry really seems to be turning into the snake that eats itself. I'm just grateful for the indie scene still being a thing.
The solution is to dramatically decrease the length of copyright, so that old games (or other software) can be obtained legally (and modified) even if the original maker no longer sells it.
Copyright is broken and has failed it’s purpose - I have no hope that we can fix it in my lifetime.
Nobody from that era probably works at Blizzard anymore and some are probably retired.
Who piracy is even supposed to be spoiling here exactly even in theory?
It may or may not be a jerk move, business-wise (I have no idea what their original agreement with GoG was when they launched it there), but from a purely preservationist point of view, nothing has yet been lost as a result of this.
(And while it's tempting to say that in the long run GoG would have been better stewards of the old builds than Blizzard, and that would certainly be true for 99% of publishers out there, keep in mind that Blizzard has successfully kept up servers and downloads for games going back to the mid-90s up to the present day. Blizzard takes preservation much more seriously than almost anyone else.)
With added DRM? Because if I remember correctly the blizzard luncher has built in DRM, unable to launch the game without it?
I understand Blizzard wants to decide what story to tell about its IP. On the other hand, many gaming veterans still want to feel and grasp the before of a remake rather than the after alone.
GOG hit a sweet spot for me. It simply fulfills my early adulthood dream: "One day, I will play all my good old games on CD again. See you fellas!"
GOG is Netflix for my earliest games. But this is not the reason, I buy games there.
Why did I buy a W2 at GOG over a year ago? It was not nostalgia but a closed-game approach.
All new "cloud" games are subscriptions in disguise. I liked the fact that game mechanics in W2 were mostly figured out, and you had to max out under fixed conditions: working on skills, not play-testing new civs.
That's the main difference between tradition and pure entertainment. All major forms of sport have a fixed rule set, with some minor tweaking here and there to leverage these.
I don't have the time nor will to grasp these changes. Age of Empires: Conquerors lost its appeal to me, because as a casual player, I cannot keep up with all the new addons. Years ago, when there were hardly any addons, I still benefited from my former RM 2000+ rating earned around 2000 at the MS ZONE and could play quite competitively online without any pro-gamer training all the time. Not anymore.
Imagine Basketball being modified significantly every season. This is what Formula 1 does now, with a lot of drama and storylines way beyond the sport, and I lost interest.