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!
Maybe for certain Collector’s Editions, but overall I don’t need optical media when the games are DRM-free anyway.
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.
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?
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
One time programmable flash could be a good a solution to this
Ugh, I would love a portable/offline launcher/installer for my GoG game files.
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
It’s fun for nostalgia but my pc doesn’t have a disc drive, nor even the space for one. Depending on your internet connection downloading is faster than reading from a disc even. If they were to somehow re-release old collector edition boxes that would become tempting.
Yeah, they can keep the disc, but I’ll gladly for a box, book and map or whatever goodies they came with
Most GOG games already allow you to download a pdf of the manual and extras if they had them
Yeah but squinting at a pdf on your monitor pales in comparison to whipping out the glossy colour print instruction booklet. I remember playing Morrowind and it came with an actual map. It was so much fun I forgot the game itself had that feature. More games should come with maps, man. Where’s my BOTW map?
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
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.
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 in any other art medium.
I would prefer them to focus on bringing more games to the Store. If people want CD everyone can print them by themself with the already DRM Free games.
I don’t care about the disc, but I would happily pay 20 bucks to get a map and 80 page booklet for some games.
Much rather have them create read-only (or semi read only to import patches?) flash-storage USB sticks.
Who the hell has a built-in CD player or even a BD-player in this time and age?
I have an external USB-CD player but only so I can digitize the CDs I buy online.Who the hell has a built-in CD player or even a BD-player in this time and age?
The answer is nerds. The specific answer is the type of nerds who would buy this sort of thing.
You’re looking at one right now, in fact — I have an internal 5.25" Blu-Ray burner in the lone singular bay in my current case. (The machine with the conga line of nearly every type of floppy drive ever created down the front of it lives in the basement.)
Automatic Ripping Machine doeant count ;)
Idk if ripping CDs every few months counts towards nerdy tasks :D
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
If they came with manual, posters, artwork and all the goodies of old game boxes could be a win.
Also better done with completed games that are no longer to be updated.
For an empty box with a cd that once installed you need to download a 50Gb patch for it to be playable would make no sense.
Discworld (1995) came with an actual t-shirt in the box. But there was an insane period in the early 2000s where they’d stopped doing manuals, maps and other extras but still packaged the disc in a box the size of a 450g cornflakes packet.
I’m ok with manuals not being a thing, because it’s a reflection of improvements in both software and game design where you don’t need to read 24 pages of text before you can play a game. But I’m not ok with publishers basically killing the secondary market.
I think physical copies are still important, and if I ever go as far as selling my own games, I plan to sell them alongside the digital copies. I’ll see how much I can put into it after losing the 30% Gaben tax, likely a small box with installer DVD (or optionally USB stick if I will be able to find quality ones for cheap) + printed manual will be the baseline, then a Big Box edition for more money with some more goodies (soundtrack CDs + artbook + posters + other tats).
That’s the thing. Steam caught on in part because compared to physical retail “only” 30% was a massive improvement for the average game company. I’ve heard 60-70+% going to buying/printing floppies/CDs, packaging, distribution, etc. at the high end. I’m sure the big companies got bulk discounts or multi-year deals for supplies.
Yes that meant that since those aspects were a significant amount of the cost anyway you could do stuff like the StarCraft Battlechest that was crammed with extras. But it also did a lot of gatekeeping in it’s own right.
Now you could probably do some kind of limited run thing that would be a lot more viable, but it’s definitely a luxury step up.
~thinks about cloth maps from Ultima games
~ heavy breathing
They used to make them out of cloth???
They were beautiful! (this one has extra annotations written on it by the player)you used to get all kinds of really cool and amazing shit when you bought games, maps, manuals, pewter figures, and more.
Oh man the first 2 fallouts with box art and discs would go crazy for me
I don’t have the fancy boxes and art, but I’ve been taking all my offline installers and burning them on cds and dvds.
My little USB disc drive has been working overtime this year.
I’m hoping to get a desktop with cd storage framing the monitor like I used to have.
Practical? Not really. I just think it’s neat.
