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General discussionDo you have a GOG back up folder ?(123 posts)(123 posts)
(123 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 09, 2015
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PookaMustard: To answer your question, its a comparison of price and value of GOG vs Steam, where the answer to the question "Is it DRM-free?" alters the final value drastically. GOG wins in that regard.
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markrichardb: Well it’s certainly a big draw for me personally. The site bills itself on being DRM-Free and offers an alternative platform for those of us who are concerned about such things. Not everyone is so interested though, and the value you’re assigning to ownership is somewhat nebulous and varies from individual to individual. I would tend to agree with ET3D’s claim that Steam prices are generally lower, and then refer back to your mention of price and value. When any service offers a cheaper price, the first question we should ask it how. Where is that difference coming from?

GoG tests the product, has a 30 day money back guarantee, and in the case of older games usually ends up retrofitting it for modern systems. Steam’s quality control is to put it mildly, a running joke. The store has hosted software breaking more copyright laws than a Pokemon party-thrower (isn’t it great when everything comes full circle?), and while its refund system is fantastic next to its previous policy, it’s still far from ideal. GoG offers safety, Steam offers a revolver with a bullet in the chamber. GoG offers quality assurance, Steam offers Day One: Garry’s incident, the aforementioned bullet.
While I don't agree with your point that the value of ownership is nebulous (mine is actually reasonable), I like that you brought another point. The product itself and the after-purchase.

As you said, with GOG, the product is optimized to just run on modern systems with little to no trouble besides the install. You don't get a broken game on GOG, and even if you do, the customer support is working great. That alone should raise the value tons. However with Steam, oh my, the declining quality of games, their inability to just run, and then the terrible customer support... it all takes a toll here on the value.
Posted October 09, 2015
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PookaMustard: You don't get a broken game on GOG, and even if you do, the customer support is working great.
Some people would beg to differ. Still probably not as bad as Steam's, but at least Steam's refund policy is no questions asked, while GOG at least occasionally has some trouble granting refunds even when there are problems running the game.
Posted October 09, 2015
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PookaMustard: You don't get a broken game on GOG, and even if you do, the customer support is working great.
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ET3D: Some people would beg to differ. Still probably not as bad as Steam's, but at least Steam's refund policy is no questions asked, while GOG at least occasionally has some trouble granting refunds even when there are problems running the game.
Steam's refund policy is a just an enfant at this point. It came because it was forced down Valve's greedy throats, not because Valve wanted to, that is to provide a great customer experience.

GOG chose it by their own will however. I'll need to see how they work myself and see the overall experience as I provide the customer support the information they need in all its detailed glory, but since I haven't met a broken GOG game yet, I don't even see the urge to talk to them (at least you could TALK to them easily, not meet the drones running Valve's non-existent support). That's how well GOG takes care of selling products to you. They put you first, then money later, the exact opposite of Valve.
Posted October 09, 2015
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PookaMustard: You don't get a broken game on GOG, and even if you do, the customer support is working great.
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ET3D: Some people would beg to differ. Still probably not as bad as Steam's, but at least Steam's refund policy is no questions asked, while GOG at least occasionally has some trouble granting refunds even when there are problems running the game.
That particular aspect of the policy and the unambiguity of ‘for any reason’ is quite nice, though a 2 hour limit is still really poor next to the refund policy of GoG or even Origin. It’s useful for combating broken Indi games missing the exe file (seriously), but mostly just allows us to channel our anger at a technically inept AAA franchise. If you’re hinting that GoG’s refunds process doesn't have the appeal of Steam’s more immediate action, I've never requested a refund from Steam and have no comparison. I can tell you about my experiences with GoG support though. Three times I've contacted staff, and got one response in all three attempts. One message was for press reasons, one for a technical issue for my Wasteland 1 code (it should be mentioned they fixed it, albeit silently), and one message, the one I received a reply to, was a general kudos to the staff for their work.

Oh I see how it is, GoG. Only respond to the nice ones! :P
Post edited October 09, 2015 by markrichardb
Posted October 11, 2015
I have all my games backed up on a dedicated (for games) external HD. It makes it easy if I want to install a game on one of my other computers.
Posted October 11, 2015
Of course I do... I have an external drive solely dedicated to backups, and I should also have some older copies on DVD/DVD-RAM

Going DRM-free and then not doing a physical copy of your stuff, so that you still have to rely on a download service, is the most backward logic I can think of
Post edited October 11, 2015 by Antaniserse
Posted October 11, 2015
A tale to tell...

Recently i put my external backup drives in a safe while we were away for a week, when i came back and hooked them back up, it seemed to not want to recognize my games drive (which holds my gog games and stuff). Quite annoying, as windows kept insisting i needed to format the drive when i knew that wasn't the problem.

So trying chkdsk on it, it recognized it as NTFS, and it seems sectors between 35k-38k were corrupted. Not sure exactly what that means, but after an hour of scanning and working the drive is up and running again as normal...

I was seriously worried i lost ALL my games downloads and stuff. That would have been annoying...
Posted October 11, 2015
thats why I store my backups on a RAID system. No fear about a disk having a physical failure.
Posted October 11, 2015
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rtcvb32: A tale to tell...

Recently i put my external backup drives in a safe while we were away for a week, when i came back and hooked them back up, it seemed to not want to recognize my games drive (which holds my gog games and stuff). Quite annoying, as windows kept insisting i needed to format the drive when i knew that wasn't the problem.

So trying chkdsk on it, it recognized it as NTFS, and it seems sectors between 35k-38k were corrupted. Not sure exactly what that means, but after an hour of scanning and working the drive is up and running again as normal...

I was seriously worried i lost ALL my games downloads and stuff. That would have been annoying...
Better make a clone of this drive asap, if you can afford another drive.
Posted October 11, 2015
No, but I intend to make one soon.
Posted October 11, 2015
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Antaniserse: Going DRM-free and then not doing a physical copy of your stuff, so that you still have to rely on a download service, is the most backward logic I can think of
I don't see it so black and white. For most people it is about probabilities.

I consider the GOG games on my GOG account as the online backup of my GOG stuff. If I feel GOG is secure and not going offline any time soon without any warning signs, I might just as well keep my games only on GOG servers.

If at some point I started feeling differently, I might make a local backup of all GOG games.

I do have all my GOG games on a local backup (except the last two I bought, HuniePop and Europa Universalis 3, but that should be fixed later today), but at this point it is more about convenience than fearing GOG might go bankcrupt and offline. I keep local DRM-free backups of some other stores like DotEmu, GamersGate etc. simply because I don't visit those sites anymore.

Also since GOG is up and running, I only keep one local copy of the GOG games. If the hard drive dies, oh well, I'll redownload them (with gogrepo). Even if I have two or several local backups on different physical locations, it is still theoretically possible I'd lose them all around the same time, but I wouldn't necessarily consider it probable.
Posted October 11, 2015
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Klumpen0815: Better make a clone of this drive asap, if you can afford another drive.
Afterwards it says it only has 1 sector that was bad. I wonder how much of it was some odd caching issue with windows that i tried to make sure was clean but ended up not being. And considering the drive is 2Tb, nearly full, that's a lot of data to copy...
Posted October 11, 2015
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Klumpen0815: Better make a clone of this drive asap, if you can afford another drive.
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rtcvb32: Afterwards it says it only has 1 sector that was bad. I wonder how much of it was some odd caching issue with windows that i tried to make sure was clean but ended up not being. And considering the drive is 2Tb, nearly full, that's a lot of data to copy...
get a tool to read out the S.M.A.R.T. diagnosis of the drive(CrystalDiskInfo for example). That might give you a better picture whether that was just a windows screwup due to a unclean disk removal/shutdown/whatever or really a physical problem indicating the drive is reaching the end of its life span.
Posted October 11, 2015
Well, I've read the entire thread (and several others like it during my time here) and while I see there's a point for some people, I still can't find a single valid reason for myself to spend time and money backing up my GOGs.

If GOG dies, I trust we'll be given enough notice to download all our stuff. If the whole internet dies, I won't need games any more because I'll be too busy hunting for food and fighting off invaders and generally trying to adapt to the collapse of society
Posted October 11, 2015
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Smannesman: I Go Grepo my GOG games to an external drive.
Once you Go Grepo, you just can't... splepo.

But to answer the original question, yes. I used to maintain it with the GOG downloader because it could verify, but I recently went Grepo.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionDo you have a GOG back up folder ?(123 posts)(123 posts)
(123 posts)