GOG has made the sudden announcement that WarCraft I & II are being pulled from sale from their store.
As revealed on Twitter, the delisting will happen on December 13, 2024.
This comes three weeks after Blizzard announced WarCraft Remastered Battle Chest, which comes with full remasters of WarCraft I & II, and an updated version of 2020’s WarCraft III: Reforged.
These updates seem to be made with the hope that Blizzard can mount a revival of the RTS games that the WarCraft IP was originally based on. We have seen a revival of the genre with the likes of Company of Heroes and Age of Mythology hitting consoles alongside PC in the past two years.
Blizzard has a lot of catching up to do on that front, and this seems like a decent first step forward. We think most of you will agree that that shouldn’t come at the expense of this older version. But maybe some of you don’t quite get why GOG’s versions of these games are special, or different.
So we need to get back to the origins of GOG and its parent company, CD Projekt RED itself. Before they made original games, CDPR was a publisher and distributor for its native Poland. CDPR solved the issue of rampant video game piracy in their country, by offering legal versions of games that were DRM-free, clean to install, and came with many deluxe additions.
There were all physical CD copies of games, in big boxes. But more importantly, CDPR put in the work to reprogram these games after they got the license for them. They did the work of cleaning up these games that the official developers and IP owners wouldn’t spend money on.
CD Projekt RED founded GOG with all of this in mind, bringing with them not only everything they learned from that experience, but the philosophy they had formed in preserving video games. And that was the philosophy they brought to Blizzard, when they made that deal to make their own versions of these games and released them in 2019.
With all of this in mind, CDPR has pledged to keep WarCraft I & II in GOG for everyone who bought the games even after delisting. But going beyond that, they have also added the two games to their GOG Preservation Program, which they announced last month.
And that’s still not everything. They have also created a checkout code, MakeWarcraftLiveForever, so that those who are buying the two games can get a slight discount.
It goes without saying, but gamers should definitely be making their voices heard at Blizzard and Microsoft to change their mind. We will point out here that in 2015, Bethesda worked out a deal to bring their classic Fallout games back to GOG, as well as their other classics. Yes, that happened before Microsoft even bought Bethesda, and those games remain at GOG to this day.
Given Microsoft’s new push to meet gamers where they are, this move is not only aggravating for fans of old games – it’s antithetical to what they are trying to do. And that certainly raises questions if Microsoft signed off on all of this, or if Phil should be paying closer attention to Blizzard’s decisions.
In any case, gamers should definitely make noise on this issue, since it doesn’t just hurt gamers and GOG. It actually undermines Microsoft, at a time where they want to show they’re going to do better.
