GOG’s Preservation Program quietly crossed a milestone this month. On October 15, 2026, the DRM-free storefront added The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition Deluxe and Ghostwire: Tokyo to the initiative, pushing the program’s catalog to 331 titles and 1,702 documented preservation improvements, according to GOG’s own program page. It is a modest-sounding update on paper. In practice, it is the clearest signal yet that GOG’s bet on permanence, not just price, is becoming its main pitch against Steam, Epic, and the console storefronts that increasingly treat a game purchase as a revocable license.
The timing matters. GOG changed hands less than a year ago, and the new owner has leaned harder into preservation messaging than CD Projekt ever did. What started in November 2024 as a modest 100-title pilot has more than tripled in under two years, and the program is now central to how GOG explains why it still exists in a market Steam dominates by sheer catalog size. This is a story about what “owning” a digital game actually means in October 2026, and about a platform trying to turn a philosophical stance into a durable business.
What GOG Just Added to the Preservation Program
GOG’s October 15 announcement brought two very different games into the fold. Ghostwire: Tokyo, Bethesda and Tango Gameworks’ supernatural action title, arrived on GOG for the first time and joined the Preservation Program immediately, meaning it skipped the usual gap between a game’s GOG debut and its preservation designation. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion joined as the Game of the Year Edition Deluxe, now running GOG build version 1.2.0416, with localized text in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. That is a meaningfully different undertaking than preserving a modern title: Oblivion first launched in 2006, and getting a twenty-year-old Bethesda engine to run cleanly on current Windows builds is exactly the kind of unglamorous technical labor the program is built around.
Both additions are DRM-free, standalone installers, meaning players can download a complete offline copy, store it, back it up, and run it without GOG Galaxy, without an internet connection, and without a license check phoning home. That is the structural difference GOG keeps returning to in its own messaging: preservation is not an archive you visit, it is a file you own and keep.
GOG’s official announcement framed the inclusion in plain terms. “If a game is part of the Preservation Program, it means that we commit our own resources to maintaining its compatibility with modern and future systems,” the company said in its program launch material, a commitment GOG has reiterated with each wave of additions since 2024 (GOG). The company has also tied the commercial case directly to the preservation mission: “By buying games from the Program and talking about it to your friends and family, you are preserving these iconic experiences and ensuring that our shared legacy endures,” GOG wrote, explicitly asking customers to treat purchases as acts of archival support rather than ordinary transactions.
The Program’s Growth, By the Numbers
GOG launched the Preservation Program on November 13, 2024, with 100 titles and a pledge to keep expanding it. The growth trajectory since then has been steady rather than explosive, which fits a program built on manual compatibility work rather than automated onboarding. By February 2026, the catalog had grown to 267 games with more than 1,460 documented improvements. By the middle of 2026, GOG reported 302 titles and 1,668 improvements. The October 19, 2026 snapshot of the program page shows 331 games, 1,702 improvements, and a 4.2-out-of-5 average user rating across the collection.
| Date | Games in Program | Documented Improvements | Notable Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| November 13, 2024 | 100 | Program launch | Initial pilot wave under CD Projekt ownership |
| February 2026 | 267 | ~1,461 | More than doubled in roughly 14 months |
| Mid-2026 | 302 | 1,668 | Growth slows as catalog matures |
| October 19, 2026 | 331 | 1,702 | Oblivion GOTY Deluxe, Ghostwire: Tokyo added Oct. 15 |
The pace of growth is worth sitting with. Adding roughly 167 games in 14 months, then slowing to roughly 29 additions over the next eight months, suggests GOG is not simply flagging old titles as “preserved” for marketing purposes. Each addition appears to carry real engineering overhead: compatibility patches, restored content, updated installers, and in some cases new localization work, which is consistent with the per-title improvement count nearly doubling even as the title count grew by a smaller multiple.
Why GOG Is Pushing Preservation Harder Right Now
GOG’s renewed focus on preservation lines up with a change in ownership that reshaped the company’s incentives. CD Projekt, the Polish studio behind the Witcher and Cyberpunk franchises, founded GOG (originally Good Old Games) in 2008 as a DRM-free outlet for its own back catalog before expanding it into a full third-party storefront. On December 29, 2025, CD Projekt sold 100% of GOG’s shares to Michał Kiciński, a CD Projekt co-founder, in a deal GamesIndustry.biz reported at more than $25.3 million. That sale closed less than a year before this month’s Oblivion and Ghostwire: Tokyo additions, and it put GOG’s long-term strategy in the hands of someone whose public comments have focused squarely on differentiating the store from Steam rather than competing with it on catalog size.
Kiciński discussed that strategy directly with GamesIndustry.biz after the acquisition closed, framing DRM-free distribution and preservation as the throughline for GOG’s future rather than a legacy feature to maintain (GamesIndustry.biz). GOG’s own retrospective materials describe a similar arc, tracing what the company calls a quest to save PC game classics back through more than a decade of restoration work predating the formal Preservation Program (PC Gamer). The Preservation Program, in other words, is less a new initiative than a rebrand and acceleration of something GOG has done piecemeal since its founding.
That history matters because it gives GOG a credibility argument Steam and Epic cannot easily copy. Steam’s optional DRM and Epic’s storefront both allow some preservation-friendly behavior, but neither company has built a marketing identity, let alone an ownership structure, around the explicit promise that games will remain playable decades after a storefront might shut down or a publisher might vanish.
Digital Ownership Across the Major Storefronts
GOG’s pitch only lands if the alternative looks genuinely different, so it is worth laying out how the major storefronts actually handle DRM and developer economics in 2026. Steam’s Steamworks DRM is optional at the publisher level, meaning a developer can ship a title on Steam without DRM if they choose, though most do not. Valve’s standard revenue split starts at 70% to the developer and 30% to Valve, with the developer share reportedly rising to 75% after a title crosses $10 million in revenue and 80% after $50 million. Secondary industry estimates put Steam’s total catalog somewhere north of 100,000 titles, with some trackers citing figures above 117,000; no single official October 2026 total has been published by Valve itself.
Epic Games Store runs a flatter structure: an 88% developer share against a 12% Epic commission, with some Epic terms crediting developers 100% of the first $1 million in annual revenue per title under separate program rules. Epic’s DRM approach is less uniform than GOG’s blanket DRM-free policy, since many Epic titles remain tied to the Epic launcher rather than shipping as portable installers. Catalog estimates for Epic’s storefront run roughly 4,500 to 6,000 titles, far smaller than Steam’s, reflecting Epic’s exclusivity-driven acquisition strategy rather than an open marketplace model.
GOG’s own developer revenue split has not been officially confirmed in current reporting, though secondary industry sources commonly cite a comparable 70/30 structure to Steam’s base tier. Its catalog sits in the 11,000-to-12,000-title range by most secondary estimates, a fraction of Steam’s size. What GOG lacks in catalog breadth, it tries to make up for in the specificity of its ownership promise: every title, not just a flagged subset, ships DRM-free as a downloadable installer.
| Storefront | DRM Policy | Developer Revenue Share | Estimated Catalog Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| GOG | DRM-free on every title; offline installers, no launcher required | Not officially confirmed; secondary estimates ~70/30 | ~11,000–12,000 titles (secondary estimates) |
| Steam (Valve) | Optional Steamworks DRM, publisher’s choice | 70/30 base, rising to 75/25 past $10M and 80/20 past $50M revenue | 100,000+ titles (secondary estimates) |
| Epic Games Store | Launcher-linked for most titles; no universal DRM-free guarantee | 88/12 standard split; some titles get 100% of first $1M/year | ~4,500–6,000 titles (secondary estimates) |
| PlayStation Store | Purchases are digital licenses under Sony’s terms, not transferable ownership | Not publicly disclosed | Not directly comparable (console-exclusive model) |
The PlayStation Store row is the starkest contrast. Sony’s digital purchases are governed by license terms rather than outright ownership transfer, a distinction that becomes consequential whenever a title is scheduled for delisting. One October 2026 report flagged NBA 2K25 for removal from new-purchase availability on PlayStation Store starting October 30, 2026, a single title-specific event rather than evidence of a broader platform shift, but a useful illustration of the exact risk GOG’s preservation marketing is built to contrast against.
What Industry Voices Are Saying About Preservation
GOG has been unusually vocal about why preservation needs to be a business commitment rather than a slogan. In an interview published on RPG Site, GOG representatives put the stakes bluntly: “Every game that drops out of circulation is a game that may be lost for good.” The same interview connected that risk directly to GOG’s packaging decisions, arguing that “today’s releases are tomorrow’s classics, and a game that launches DRM-free, as an offline installer you can keep, is simply easier to keep alive for the next thirty years” (RPG Site).
GOG’s joint CEO, Krzysztof Papliński, made a related argument to Eurogamer as Sony continued winding down physical disc support on PlayStation hardware. “As the industry becomes increasingly digital, players should have the full confidence that the games they buy will remain accessible regardless of changes to platforms, storefronts, or business models,” Papliński said, tying GOG’s preservation push to the broader industry shift away from physical media rather than treating it as an isolated marketing angle (Eurogamer).
Those comments are notable for what they do not claim. GOG is not arguing that Steam or Epic are actively destroying games, and it has avoided direct confrontation with rival storefronts in its public statements. Instead, the company’s messaging consistently frames preservation as additive labor it is willing to fund that competitors have not prioritized, a softer but more durable positioning than a head-on pricing or feature fight it would likely lose given its catalog size.
Market Impact: A Small Storefront’s Big Differentiator
GOG’s catalog is roughly a tenth the size of Steam’s by most secondary estimates, a gap laid out in detail in a head-to-head look at Steam’s pricing versus GOG’s DRM-free ownership model, which means it cannot realistically compete on breadth, new-release timing, or community features like Steam’s review system and Workshop infrastructure. Preservation is one of the few dimensions where GOG can plausibly claim category leadership rather than a distant second place. That matters commercially because PC gaming’s purchasing decisions increasingly weigh long-term access alongside price, particularly among the segment of buyers old enough to remember a storefront or launcher disappearing with their purchases attached to it.
The Preservation Program’s recognition by the Digital Preservation Coalition, an international nonprofit focused on digital archiving standards, as a 2026 industry award finalist adds a layer of institutional validation that goes beyond GOG’s own marketing copy. It signals that organizations outside the gaming industry, with no commercial stake in GOG’s success, view the program’s approach as methodologically serious rather than purely promotional.
For publishers, the calculus is more mixed. Agreeing to let GOG invest engineering resources into a decades-old title requires some coordination, particularly for games with lapsed source access or licensing complications around music and voice work. The fact that GOG secured Ghostwire: Tokyo as a day-one Preservation Program entry, rather than retrofitting it years later, suggests at least some publishers are beginning to treat preservation-readiness as part of a launch plan rather than an afterthought.
Historical Context: From Abandonware Fixer to Preservation Brand
GOG’s preservation instincts predate the formal program by well over a decade. The storefront built its early identity in the late 2000s and early 2010s around resurrecting abandonware, old PC titles that had fallen out of print and often would not run on modern operating systems without manual patching. That early work, chronicled in outlets like MCV/Develop during GOG’s first years of operation, established the technical playbook the Preservation Program now runs at scale: licensing rights to older titles, patching compatibility issues, and distributing the result DRM-free.
What changed in November 2024 was formalization. Rather than quietly fixing old games as a value-add to its storefront, GOG built a dedicated program with its own branding, a public catalog count, and a running tally of improvements, turning what had been operational housekeeping into a headline feature. The December 2025 ownership change accelerated that framing further, with the new owner publicly tying the company’s survival strategy to preservation rather than catalog growth or price competition, a bet that only makes sense if enough of the PC gaming audience actually values the distinction between owning a file and holding a license.
Competitive Comparison: Can Steam or Epic Copy This?
Steam’s optional DRM already gives it a technical path to matching GOG’s offline-installer promise, and Valve has never prevented publishers from distributing DRM-free builds through Steamworks. The gap is not technical capability but priority: Steam’s scale means its engineering and marketing resources are spread across more than 100,000 titles, and a dedicated preservation initiative comparable to GOG’s would be a far larger undertaking relative to catalog size. Steam also has less incentive to make the argument publicly, since its install base already treats the storefront as a default rather than a considered choice.
Epic Games Store faces a more structural obstacle. Its launcher-linked distribution model for many titles makes a blanket DRM-free guarantee harder to deliver without renegotiating terms across its exclusivity deals. Epic’s competitive strategy has instead focused on revenue share and exclusive titles rather than ownership guarantees, a different axis of competition that does not overlap much with what GOG is now emphasizing.
Console storefronts are the furthest from matching GOG’s model, and that license-based structure is part of why debates like the push for a formal game-ownership bill keep gaining attention. PlayStation Store’s license-based purchase terms are a function of platform architecture, not a policy choice Sony could casually reverse, and the same is broadly true of the Xbox and Nintendo storefronts. That structural gap is precisely why GOG’s preservation argument resonates most with PC players who have already experienced a console storefront delisting a purchased title.
What This Means for Players Right Now
For players specifically weighing where to buy Oblivion’s Game of the Year Edition Deluxe or Ghostwire: Tokyo today, the practical difference is straightforward: a GOG purchase comes with a downloadable installer that will keep working offline indefinitely, while the same titles bought elsewhere may remain tied to a launcher, an online activation check, or a storefront’s continued existence. That is not a reason to avoid other storefronts outright, since GOG’s smaller catalog means plenty of titles simply are not available there. But for the subset of games that do appear in the Preservation Program, GOG’s version carries a durability guarantee that is difficult to find elsewhere in PC gaming.
Collectors and classic-game enthusiasts have the clearest reason to pay attention to each new wave of additions, since the program functions as an informal priority list of which older titles are receiving active compatibility maintenance. The jump from Oblivion’s base release to a GOTY Deluxe build patched for current Windows versions, with five-language localization intact, is the kind of maintenance work individual players would otherwise have to handle themselves through community fan patches of uneven reliability.
Predictions: Where GOG’s Preservation Push Goes Next
- Expect the Preservation Program’s growth rate to stay closer to the slower mid-2026 pace (roughly 30 titles over eight months) than the faster initial pace, as the program shifts from easy early wins to technically harder legacy titles.
- GOG will likely continue targeting single high-profile “day one” additions, following Ghostwire: Tokyo’s example, to generate press coverage disproportionate to the program’s overall catalog size.
- Expect GOG’s new ownership to keep citing preservation in public commentary whenever a competing storefront announces a delisting or license dispute, using those moments as unpaid marketing opportunities.
- Watch for other platforms, particularly itch.io, to lean further into DRM-free and preservation messaging as a shared counter-positioning against subscription and license-based models, even without directly copying GOG’s branded program structure.
- Do not expect Steam or Epic to launch a directly competing preservation initiative in the near term; both have stronger incentives to compete on new-release exclusivity and catalog breadth than on legacy-title permanence.
The Broader Stakes for Digital Game Ownership
GOG’s Preservation Program is a narrow, specific initiative, but it sits inside a much larger argument about what buying a digital game actually guarantees. That argument has been building across the industry for several years, visible in everything from console storefront delistings to the broader push for legal recognition of digital ownership rights. GOG’s approach is notable for being a market-based answer rather than a regulatory one: instead of lobbying for new consumer-protection rules, the company is betting that enough players will pay for the practical guarantee of permanence if a storefront makes that guarantee specific, countable, and marketed consistently. That bet is unfolding alongside a broader shift in how players access games at all, from cloud gaming’s rise as a console alternative to ongoing friction over launcher performance, visible most recently in Epic’s own speed claims against Steam.
Whether that bet pays off commercially is still an open question. GOG’s catalog and revenue remain far smaller than Steam’s by any available estimate, and a 331-title preservation program, however well executed, is not going to reverse that gap on its own. What it can do is give GOG a defensible niche: the one major PC storefront where “will I still be able to play this in ten years” has a documented, improving answer rather than a shrug, a question that will keep surfacing across the broader gaming industry as more purchases move from discs to downloads.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many games are currently in the GOG Preservation Program?
As of the October 19, 2026 snapshot of GOG’s program page, 331 games are included, with 1,702 documented preservation improvements and an average user rating of 4.2 out of 5.
What games were added to the Preservation Program in October 2026?
GOG added The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition Deluxe and Ghostwire: Tokyo on October 15, 2026. Ghostwire: Tokyo marked its first appearance on GOG and joined the program immediately.
When did the GOG Preservation Program launch?
The program launched on November 13, 2024, with an initial catalog of 100 titles.
Is GOG still owned by CD Projekt?
No. CD Projekt sold 100% of GOG’s shares on December 29, 2025 to Michał Kiciński, a CD Projekt co-founder, in a deal reported at more than $25.3 million.
What does “DRM-free” mean on GOG specifically?
It means every game ships as a standalone installer that players can download, back up, and run offline indefinitely, without requiring GOG Galaxy, an internet connection, or any license-check process to keep playing.
How does GOG’s developer revenue split compare to Steam and Epic?
GOG’s exact split is not officially confirmed, though secondary industry estimates suggest a structure near Steam’s base 70/30 split. Steam’s base split is 70% developer/30% Valve, rising to 75/25 past $10 million in revenue and 80/20 past $50 million. Epic Games Store uses an 88/12 split in developers’ favor.
Can I still buy games that are not part of the Preservation Program on GOG?
Yes. The Preservation Program covers a specific, growing subset of GOG’s roughly 11,000-to-12,000-title catalog by secondary estimates; it does not mean other GOG titles lack support, only that Preservation Program titles carry an explicit, documented maintenance commitment.
Has the Preservation Program received any outside recognition?
Yes. The program was named a finalist in a 2026 industry award category tracked by the Digital Preservation Coalition, an international nonprofit focused on digital archiving standards, which is independent of GOG’s own marketing.