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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 can’t say I want to pay extra for these large boxes with extra stuff, but smaller boxes like this I would definitely consider purchasing:
I never liked the jewel cases. Not enough space for anything interesting inside other than just the disc.
Did GOG ever end up meaningfully addressing that neonazi shit?
Michał Kiciński, the new owner, just posted a thorough apology: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/nazi_symbols_in_an_email_and_bs_excuse/post277
(If you’re on the default 20 posts per page view, you need to go back a page (to the bottom of page 18) to actually read post 277, as deleted posts in that thread means the linking to specific post numbers is broken.)
They said it was a bank holiday and they were understaffed and that is most of the root cause of it going out as well as suspecting of using AI to make headers for their emails which is not uncommon.
They apologized and explained it that way
No. At least not to my satisfaction.
That’s disappointing to hear.
Guess I’ll continue to not use them any more.
No.
Because they don’t feel sorry about doing it on purpose, just that people didn’t like it.
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 interpret it more as preserving those big box games from the past, not releasing new boxes. Riding the current wave for marketing.
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.
For what it’s worth, an external disc drive is not very expensive and they are quite small.
Why not just sell it in a cheap little thumb drive? Most games like this are very modest in size, would save people the cost of a disc reader.
Optical discs can store data way longer than nand flash storage.
Then maybe EP/ROMs instead of flash.
Do they need to?
5 years vs. 80. I’ll leave that up to you.
Ideally we’d get to keep both around. I can see a world where we’re trading digital media around on discs deep into the next century, but I can also see how currently there’s also room for more transient media to serve less preservation-conscious people who don’t go out of their way to own a disc drive.
go out of their way to own a disc drive.
You make it sound like they are hard to get and not just able to be purchased online like everything else.
What would be the priority from a business perspective? Saving customers the cost of a disc drive, or saving the company the cost of shifting production over to a proprietary thumb drive, most likely costing several times the price per unit of a disc?
I think the priority for the business is what people will buy. PCs don’t have disc readers as standard anymore. Now the barrier to entry for physical media is either pay more for a thumb drive or pay a lot more for a disc reader.
What if they adopted the C02 canister model. Slightly joking here, but why not treat the thumb drives as a recoverable container you can get a rebate for reusing?
they cost about the same though. An Asus slim external 8x DVD usb 2.0 writer costs $50. a 256gb thumb drive costs $50. And i’m using 256GB as an example for modern games that can potentially be well over 100gb. Add to the fact said DVD drive is going to last a lot longer than a USB thumb drive. those thumb drives have a lifespan of like 5 years.
In this specific case, that’s not apples to apples since most of the games on GOG are very small.
It’s kind of hilarious to imagine, but I can imagine doing a “BYO thumb drive” sale for physical media. They could even mail it back in the big box
The way to go. I have two of those haha.
I know but that doesn’t change the reality. Most PCs don’t come with disc readers anymore. Anyone who does have an external disc drive can already burn a GOG game to disc if they so choose. Or put the game on a usb-stick/SD-card/external drive all of which are more convenient options than using a disc. Shipping boxes for an outdated technology is a purely wasteful exercise for a company like GOG because most of their games are older releases and have no DRM. I see the benefit of discs for new console releases because it allows people to offset the cost of a game by trading it in. That has always been one of the aspects of console gaming. But that doesn’t hold for GOG
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?
