If they buy gog it will be to kill it off as that will be one competitor less.

And I agree with mqstout, Microsoft has been horrible to PC gaming, only when the Xbox One fiasco they renewed interest in PC but it won't last long. The future as far as Microsoft is concerned will be gamepass and cloudgaming or something similar further down the line.

Since Microsoft bought Zenimax, we have not had another release by Bethesda. And I guess no more Bethesda games will be added to the GOG catalog.

Gamepass is great though, so long as you use it properly. There's nothing wrong with renting games so long as you get the benefits as well as the disadvantages, ie low cost to balance out its monthly subscription nature. Get it for a month or two, play the games you want, unsub. Resub next year, when they have a crop of new games you want to play. Just don't spend months playing nothing on it while subscribed.

MS will probably allow the subdivisions that want to put stuff on GOG and already have games here to continue doing so, at least in the short to medium term. And I wouldn't worry about MS buying GOG, they'd be far more likely to try buying Steam (and indeed have tried to) since its philosophy is completely compatible with MS- and indeed everything about Steam is predicated in what Gabe Newell learned from his time at Microsoft, from Bundling for Market Share to Extend Exploit Extinguish.

(Personally, I expect the Activision purchase to get blocked in Europe on competition grounds anyway, and a Steam purchase might well be too. Not as likely as the nVidia/ ARM one where all the talk is that it's dead now due to those concerns, but still pretty likely. MS still has an awful reputation for uncompetitive practices)

And exactly the same as in the various other threads. Ubisoft sell a few games elsewhere, but it’s still all tied to their store. EA I don’t know about never go near them. Bethesda will eventually stop selling elsewhere.
Publishers that have their own store are not interested in publishing on a tiny market share store, or doing special builds or anything else just for here. You wanna buy Ubisoft, buy it on epic, you can even buy it through galaxy, but it’s still epic and Ubisoft. The only Ubisoft games here are ancient long forgotten ones. There may of course be outliers where a pub has deals to honour, but it the main M$ will never sell anything here, ever. Ubisoft won’t either, neither will R*.

No. Playing a single game may take multiple months. And lots of games [e.g., builders] are about regular replay. Gamepass only works for people who treat gaming as a disposable distraction shallowly. Or have far greater free time devoted to gaming than the median.

More? I dunno, I actually bought some Activision games that were half off as a new user bonus. I have yet to see any Microsoft classics like Zoo Tycoon or those Terminal Reality space shooters or the FASA games. But then it also took forever to get on Steam so who knows.

To answer the OP, and I know it's been said before by others, where are the AoE games? Not here... So I wouldn't get my hopes up.

No, but thankfully it seems many users (well at least on the subreddit) accept that GOG very rarely gets big-publisher games here.

With their UWP and forced 'store' installed on windows 8, 10, 11, why would they bother with Steam/GoG/Anywhere?

So don't use gamepass to play those, ie those cases aren't using Gamepass properly. Oddly you managed to cut out what "using it properly" meant from the quote to my post, the context of which- quite obviously- excluded your counter examples. I'll reiterate it though.

If you want to play a strategy game or multiplayer game month to month you're almost certainly better off buying it instead, and won't, as I put it "get [gamepass] for a month or two". But even then there may be cases where renting is sensible. If they had Paradox games + dlc available even six months of Gamepass would be cheaper than buying.

Most games are short, and don't have much if any replayability. Go in with a plan, play those games, cancel the subscription. If you played 1 hour a day you might get through 3 of those ten hour games for your ten bucks or whatever.

I played Outer Worlds and Prey for literally $1. OK, that was an introductory offer but even for a full month's sub that would be fantastic value for money compared to buying. You don't like Microsoft, fair enough, they're an awful company*. Doesn't mean they can't offer value for money on some things.

*I just tend to think they're an awful company for serious issues like Pluton rather than them not selling games on GOG. Which is hardly a unique position.

yep
it is a good offer for the games you can play , even if you subs whole year it isnt that much at least compared to full priced games

sad to see your post got downvoted it speaks the truth , but fanatics are just way too crazy here

well there is that chinese Tencent which MS will have to compete against , so probably they will allow it to buy activision/bliz .I would have waited a few years , those companies are so lackluster lately and slowly fading imho.

Have you not been following MicroSoft news lately?

MicroSoft's UWP and Windows Store has failed, MicroSoft is releasing all of their video games for sale on Steam.

All DRM'd games that are locked to the publisher's client don't really exist outside of that platform as self-contained games. Ubisoft sells a game on Steam that still requires uPlay = it's still a Uplay platform game at its core that simply comes wrapped in a second layer of "digital cellophane" for the cosmetic benefit of Steam gamers demanding "all my games in one place". The "Steam version" (that continues to require uPlay) is really little more than a glorified affiliate selling a glorified shortcut link / library entry to starting the uPlay client to play the game...

Likewise, the newest EA games on GOG are Dragon Age Origins, Mirrors Edge and The Saboteur (all 2009 games), and the newest Ubisoft one is Rayman Origins (2012). There's nothing to say they can't sell anything here, but it's painfully obvious they lost interest in selling newer post 2010 big title games on GOG around the same time-frame as the creation of uPlay & Origin. Far Cry (2004) was here on GOG by 2008 after just 4 years, with Far Cry 2 not far behind, so Far Cry 3 (2012), WatchDogs (2014), etc, should have been here by 2016-2018 based on the same 4 year delay timetable that GOG previously enjoyed with Ubisoft in the 2000's prior to uPlay, and yet here we are in 2022...

As for Microsoft, it was only because the Microsoft Store exclusive "Quantum Break" flopped badly that they begrudgingly went back and released on Steam. And simple remasters of +20-25 year old games like Age of Empires 1-2 HD / Definitive basically mean we won't see those games here on GOG at all (because expensive remasters are more profitable than older classics, so the classics get removed, but we also won't see those remasters here because they've been DRM'd up to the eyeballs (ie, MS Store + Arxan (the MS Store equivalent of Denuvo) = there won't be a DRM-Free version for GOG). As much as some want to paint a picture that "Microsoft has changed", I believe all these publisher acquisitions probably have far more to do with MS raising a middle finger towards Sony regarding the Xbox vs PS tribal console war p*ssing contest over "exclusives", than it 'enhances choice for PC gamers' (a marketing phrase I recall them once using for Games For Windows Live...)

Microsoft hasn't changed at all. They may have abandoned their dream of forcing the UWP monstrosity onto everyone, but MS published games and the MS Store is still just as pro-DRM now as GFWL was, so absolutely nothing new will come to GOG at all.

Unless I missed a store, Freelancer isn't sold anywhere. So there's clearly an issue with the rights to the game/music.