I have recently been doing some thinking about my childhood and I very fondly remember the times where my Dad would show me the games he grew up playing, Zaxxon, Beechhead, Bruce Lee and Last Ninja come to mind as some of his favourites. It got me thinking that with games today becoming services (I hate that phrase!) and being rammed with DRM that I may not be able to do the same if I were to have kids which I feel would be a real shame. This of course assumes they showed an interest in computers as I did.

This, for me, is why I will always buy from GOG where possible as I can have offline installers off all the games I own so that I have the best possible chance of playing them again in 20/30 years time.

What about my Steam, Uplay, Origin, Epic library? no offline installers there, if those services go then so does our libraries that we have all spent huge amounts of money..

So my question is, with games that you own (license!) on the aforementioned storefronts, do you find alternative versions that allow you to keep an offline installer of those games? I in no way condone piracy, if you want to play a game, you buy it, my sole interest is in preserving my library of games. Do you think its ethical to do so?

I'd be really interested to know peoples thoughts on this.

No, I don't find drm skippers for them.
But if their service will go away and won't let me access my games, I'll look for possibilities to keep playing them.
That is perfectly ethical, you already paid for the games, it is not a subscription model where you are limited by time, so I can't see why you shouldn't keep playing the games.

Just look at from a different perspective, should they give back your money if they fail to provide the product you paid for?
Ethically they should :)

I think the question should be reversed: why would it be "unethical"? (or amoral, depending on semantics/definition)

I generally don't buy games with online DRM at all. For older disc based with offline DRM (eg, simple disc checks, etc) I always sourced a clean "NoCD" as soon as I got them, not for piracy but insurance against something breaking later on. 20 years on that decision was 100% justified when Microsoft started blocking the same SecuROM dll's called by said DRM in Windows 10. I can still play those games. People who didn't remove the DRM from it and just relied on "faith" that they'd always continue to work cannot. So IMHO, there's nothing remotely morally wrong with the equivalent of using a pair of bolt cutters to remove a chain which ties a book you legally purchased from a rotting bookshelf that needs replacing.

I only buy from places that provide DRM-free offline installers, such as GOG, itch.io and sometimes Humble Bundle. Those are the digital retail shops I use, but there are other places as well such as the Zoom Platform, FireFlower Games etc.

If a game I'm really really dying to play is not available on any of them, I'll try to see if I can find a second hand retail copy. Of course, this only works with older games that have had physical releases. Now if that copy is protected by all manner of SecuROMs and SafeDisks and whatnot, I have no remorse in bypassing them. I own the damn game, paid for it - have my copy and my serial code. I am going to get it in a playable state, EULA be damned.

Like you, I can't and won't condone piracy, but I found out the hard way in the past, that sometimes, after a certain point, an illegal path may be the only way to play a legally purchased game, (case here: downloading and using a small illegal file after a certain online-DRM-server got taken down).

So, the way I see it: since you paid for these games, you are "allowed" to use "alternative game files", to play them even after the aforementioned stores might close shop (or if other obstructions get in the way of playing them - apart form pure technical reasons, of course (like: new and incompatible hardware and/or OS used on your side)).

Again: this only goes, if you legally purchased the games in question.

I really don't care about the old "but you didn't purchase the game itself, you just purchased a license" bullshit.

So far, not a single gaming company, has offered me to payback (part of) my money in case they ever find themselves unable to fulfill their part of our contract, anymore.

If they are not legally oblieged to pay me back in such a case...I am not oblieged to only use their legal files.

Quite simple for me: Don't buy anything that's not DRM-free (which includes no client for download, for those who for some unfathomable reason don't consider that to be DRM).
And never had ethical dilemmas about roaming the high seas for something not legally offered on terms I can fully agree with, and doubt I will if it will come to a game I'll really want to play badly enough and won't be available on such terms. But at the same time, with backlog as it is and my old computer and how patient I typically am, haven't done it in a decade and doubt it'll happen in the foreseeable future either, no reason to bother.

But, on topic, if you do have something legally purchased that's tied to a service, definitely see nothing wrong (ethically and morally, not speaking legally of course, but legal and right/good may well be very different things, sometimes sadly even opposites) with "jailbreaking" it to still be able to make full use of it if/when the service goes down (even temporarily).

I don't think it unethical or even amoral, to make a game you paid for, DRM-Free. I used to obtain No-CD patches for all the games I bought, until I started almost exclusively buying from GOG.

So long as you are not ripping anyone off of what they are due financially etc, how is it wrong?

The only wrong part, would be sharing such a DRM-Free game indiscriminately with others.

No, it would be "wrong" to share it discriminately too. It's easy to type you're "sharpest tool" if you're a larper. I like to interpret your self-entitled claim as the secondary definition of "tool" that is more directly personally applicable, then it fits very well.

In my opinion it is simple.

If both parties agree and make mutual deal, both must follow what was agreed. If one party do something against agreement, then second side can do it as well. From this point of view it depends what was in the agreement.

If you do not agree with something like e.g. DRM you can buy where it is without DRM, let's call it passive approach or you can be active. Why not to writer publisher, that you would buy it, but only without DRM... I can if you do it and other not, it will probably lead nowhere. On the other hand if you would do this each time and let others know (who will be interested), than it can change. For example I remember when 20 years ago I decided to stop watching TV (still I do not watch it). At that time people look on me as on a weirdo... Today it is new social standard for young people.

It’s a completely moot point. By the time your children are in their teens, they will have no understanding of offline, ownership, privacy, or any of these other quaint notions. Everything, be it games, films, your toaster, will be hardwired directly to skynet. The current generation do not care about drm free, or owning products, heck UK government policy is to ensure that everyone is in as much debt as possible, hence they likely don’t even own the clothes they are wearing.
Also remember that technology since your dads day and today has exponentially grown, the next evolution is embedded technology, actually implanted hardware, that Google chip you get implanted as a babe so it can track all your likes and wants for instance. In the US they now have stores where you don’t pay, just wander around a shop and it charges you on exit, how long before people forget completely about the concept of money.
So no, there is no ethical dilemma, there is only what you do or don’t do. Heck I wouldn’t even worry about what others think, he who throws the first stone and all that. If I was you I would be more worried about what your smart meter or Alexa has been sending back to the mother brain.

The finger-breaking-leg-busting loan shark agrees with you.

That question is kind of a moot point, because if you are downloading pirated games in order to preserve them, in modern times, then chances are that you are not actually preserving them, because in that case, with the vast majority of the games, you are only getting the 1.0 version with zero patches applied to it.

And patches are usually not available to download as standalone files any more.

And even in the very rare cases where they are, they usually cannot be applied to pirated versions anyway.

Besides that, games like Ubisoft's games are often multiplayer primarily, which are tied to their servers specifically, and without having access to which, the game is virtually useless.

On top of all that, I find a bigger 'ethical dilemma' than the one presented in the OP, to be paying out money in order to rent DRM-infested games, hence I rarely do that. Therefore, I do not have large libraries on Steam, Uplay, Origin, EGS (mostly I have their free games only), etc., in the first place.

I also don't agree with the OP's philosophy that it's a good idea to buy DRM-infested games just because you want to play them. By buying DRM-infested games, then one reinforces the status quo wherein most games will continue to be DRM-infested forever and be offered on a rental basis only.

So by buying DRM-infested games from many DRM storefronts, the OP is actually helping to perpetuate the perpetual continuation of the very same problem that he is complaining about, i.e. the difficulty with owning & preserving games.

Before digital distribution took off, deprotects were very popular to strip obnoxious copy protection off legitimately purchased physical pc games. At the height of the plague, I was careful to collect those for every disc I purchased. Similarly, if a digital distributor's DRM ever got in the way of me playing my games, by say going out of business and taking the DRM servers offline, I would not hesitate to strip it.

DRM-free services like GOG are nice because you don't have to worry about that and are worth supporting.