Speaking of tornadoes, I had one hit my house a few years ago even though I live in a part of the US that is known for earthquakes and fire season when it comes to nature getting angry events. A DRM-free library in a cloud situation, such as being able to download off GOG, is probably safer in some respects than physical copies.

Of course I do.

1. If you're willing to invest, you can buy or create a NAS to keep your games forever as long as you can run it, with data backup and all. The NAS won't live forever but so does your gaming rigs but you're gonna buy new rigs anyway unless you quit gaming so you can keep maintaning the NAS to keep your games with you as long as you want.

2. And objects are just patterns of molecules. The concept of owning things is abstract and disputable (look at Buddhism). But I don't want to "really own" my games. I just want to gain access to my games and no DRM = fewer obstacles to gaining access. Imagine if your game is not compatible to your PC. You can emulate the game and still play it. But that might not be enough if it has some forms of DRM and now you also need a crack to play it. Now gaining access to your game also depends on your access to the crack.

3. If people still play them, they will be playable. DOS games still run these days but how many people have a DOS PC?

Yeah I would switch to digital downloads of movies too if a GOG type entity existed. Sadly it doesn't.

I would love something like GOG for movies. While I personally don't have a lot of movies in physical copies, there's the rest of the household. Each person wanting just a few movies each year really does add up.

We purchased Foundation, DL it to our PC, and can either play it while hooked up to the net, or with our modem and router powered down, cause our saved games are also on our SSD. If that isn't "owning" a prog, we don't know what is. QED. ((;--))

But then again, it's also not, because GOG is always in a financially vulnerable position in which its future existence is never guaranteed, and it could easily go bankrupt at any point in time.

Think of it like owning a car, the parts may wear out if not properly maintained.

Like anything you own storage is your responsibility.

I have games from 20 years ago, and 20 years from now I will have what I purchased from GOG.

Making sure that data stays usable is up to me.

Sorry, I don't follow what you are trying to say. Why guilt?

That is exactly how I feel as well.

The fact that there are DRM-Free installers is the reason I still shop at GOG, it is very important to me and I haven't purchased software with DRM in it for years now.

that doesnt mean you are rightfully using the games after they decided you are no longer allowed to access them

fe what if you download it from a pirate site ? can they do anything against that ? probably not , do you rightfully own those ? nope

Well, if they refund you then you'd have to see what the terms of service say but, otherwise, my standard is "If you didn't give me back my money, then you can f*** off."

That's also why I never use DRMed stuff. There's no legal system in place to ensure that, even in case of bankruptcy where the government might have to step up and foot the bill, either I get what I paid for or I get my money back.

(Well, that and I prefer *not* to be subject to revocation, even if they try to give my money back. Before the era of digital stuff, there was a certain element of "Who cares what the law says. Intuitive understanding of the first sale doctrine is the only thing that's enforceable", and DRM-free allows that to remain the case.)

If you're talking about the strict letter of the law, then the EULA on your physical-copy game could just as easily say "If we refund your money, you can't refuse the refund and are legally required to destroy the disc/cartridge/etc." regardless of whether it has any online checks.

The real question seems to be whether it is possible to own anything. After all, while some items may be more durable than others, I have never heard of any physical object that is indestructible. Cars and houses and furniture and rugs and knick-knacks can be crushed, burned, or otherwise damaged. As far as games are concerned, floppy discs, CD-ROMs , flash drives, and the like will all eventually degrade and thus become unreadable/unusable. And digital objects are only as good as the drives, servers, cloud storage, etc. that keep their files safe and uncorrupted.

As others have pointed out, games are only playable (in their original form) as long as: 1) the original technology used to play them holds out, or 2) someone designs emulators, patches, etc. so old games can run on new technology, and 3) someone makes and distributes the appropriate joystick or controller needed to play the game as originally intended. I imagine that historians and game fans will continue to develop this technology long into the future, but that isn't a given since mass poverty, the destruction of most of the human race, or other calamities could take away the time, physical resources, knowledge, and/or labor necessary to keep games and peripherals updated (or prevent most people from owning the necessary technology to store files and play games).

So if you buy a game from GOG today, will you still be able to play it in 40 years? Maybe yes, maybe no. But that is true whether you get the game from Steam or some other e-store or buy it in a physical format. And because GOG lets you download files that it cannot subsequently delete from your machine or your peripheral storage, you have a better shot at being able to play it in the future than you would otherwise.

I can still play Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) on the PC after 46 years. ScummVM and DOSBox have been around since 2001-2002 (2-3 years before Steam was born) and I don't doubt they'll still be around post-Steam too. Many 90's games here have had source ports that have added native support for non-Windows platforms so cross-platform compatibility has actually increased rather than reduced. If the worst comes to the worst and if Microsoft truly goes off the deep end and turns W12 into some UWP-only walled garden, I'd either 1. Switch to Linux for the games that work on it and learn to tweak better, or 2. Just buy 2-3x spare budget last-gen motherboards & CPU's and run the last good older Windows version offline as a retro rig for the next 20 years. Either way many of your games would work without being held hostage to either major architectural changes or any potential Microsoft's "The future of Windows is to become another shitty walled garden locked down mobile app store but for the desktop!" delusions of grandeur.

Unlike Steam's "Subscriber Agreement", it's literally spelled out in Section 17.3 of the GOG EULA that you can continue to use your "GOG content" offline post-GOG.

As long as you back them up, the games are yours and no one can take them back, so yes, I own them.

And I own games that were far harder to backup than anything bought on GOG, most notably being DragonStrike. This is the old DOS era dragon flight simulator game. It fell into abandonware, which meant that I could always draw from that version if anything ever happened to my copies.... until whoever owned the rights decided to tell websites to take it down. At this point, there's a few places where you can play online, but you cannot buy it anywhere.
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/dragonstrike

The only backups I have of DragonStrike are the ones I keep for myself, and it's been this way for years. If I can keep a copy of this game, a GOG library is a lot easier. If anything does happen to cause GOG to go out of business, it will just be like the situation I currently have with DragonStrike.

People need to stop acting like GOG libraries are magically the absolute most vulnerable thing in existence. You are allowed to download the offline installers and back them up. You can install the game through Galaxy and copy the game folder to back the game up that way too. This isn't Steam, where you're technically violating an EULA for backing up games you buy.

The OP is pretending to do this, not many people are worried about this.

Don't feed the trolls, you are adding to the problem.