You now have to support an additional production build of your game.
You're suggesting that takes no effort?
By the way - patches don't just mean actual gameplay patches. Patches also means compatibility with future operating systems, drivers, and hardware that you can't possibly know anything about today.
> You now have to support an additional production build of your game.
What kind of build? The most they'd need to do is to repackage it. And really GOG do it on their own, so all they need to do is to provide the game to GOG. There is no build involved for such older games.
> Patches also means compatibility with future operating systems, drivers, and hardware that you can't possibly know anything about today.
Those don't depend on distributors, they are universal. I.e. if they are doing it on Steam, they can use it on GOG as well.
> What kind of build? The most they'd need to do is to repackage it. And really GOG do it on their own, so all they need to do is to provide the game to GOG. There is no build involved for such older games.
It doesn't matter. It's an extra build. That means extra testing and QA resources. Have you heard of regression bugs?
> Those don't depend on distributors, they are universal. I.e. if they are doing it on Steam, they can use it on GOG as well.
Maybe. Maybe not. Either way it's another build to support. You won't know until you test it.
If they can't handle trivial packaging (tarball) or consider it an insurmountable effort - they should switch to some other business. Again, such older games don't get allocated QA and other resources normal production cycle games do. They get very minimal treatment. GOG do that QA for them actually. And if there are major problems, GOG either fix it on their own, or they reject those games if they can't fix some very major bugs. In result their versions actually tend to work better than Steam ones. Such companies like EA or 2K on the other hand aren't likely to go and fix bugs in their old releases.
The question isn't how trivial it is (fairly), but how much work it is compared to the money it would bring in. From my limted experience if could well be < $5,000. That doesn't buy a lot of developer time.
Trivial one time effort isn't a problem in comparison with potential sales.
If 20,000 already requested a game on GOG which they sell for around $10-$15, you'll get way more than $5,000. How much sales that would be can of course vary from game to game, but I don't think Bioshock games are in trouble of not being bought.
You're suggesting that takes no effort?
By the way - patches don't just mean actual gameplay patches. Patches also means compatibility with future operating systems, drivers, and hardware that you can't possibly know anything about today.