Depending on the game, that either works, or doesn't work.

I choose to properly install the game on all PCs I am going to play it. Usually it is just one PC though, I hardly ever have a need to be able to play the same game on multiple PCs "at the same time".

1. purchase a 1 TB external hard drive for 50 $
2. download the Python script gogrepo.py
3. start a complete backup and wait 3 days

Done! All your gog games are save and offline available.

The fear for GOG going down is less so day by day as GOG shows how it's going stronger than ever, not withstanding all the cracks or weaknesses it has shown recently. If you are concerned about that however, invest in a backup solution. Like others said, you might want to use gogrepo.py and backup your stuff to an external drive (or you can even burn to discs if you want).

It's better than nothing if you do invest in a backup solution. You'll never know when you won't have internet to begin with.

If you're an avid game collector with an impressive backlog, you're going to need more than 1 TB. My full binary backups currently take up around 1.4 TB.

Possible some of you don't know that - but CDP Group is now worth more than Capcom. Not likely it will go down anytime soon. But of course - that doesn't prevent me from backing up my games few moments after I buy them.

Whilst I agree that there is no other solution than backing up, I would like to also throw this into the mix. It may or may not be feasible, hopefully others can comment on it.

When Gog goes down, whilst you would not have the option to download your games, I believe that this is an area where all those people who constantly claim that you never actually own a game that you purchase, that you merely own the license- get to answer this:-

If you can prove that you purchased a license, then it follows that you are still entitled to use it and that reasonable attempts should be made by the developer/publisher to furnish you with the files for which you have a license to use.

I keep all my Gog receipts (again-backed up) proving I have purchased a license.

I would not rely on this of course. What do you think Gogers, a feasible additional avenue?

I don't think so. They want to compete with Steam in terms of Ease of Use and choice of AAA games without having the disadvantages (namely DRM, but also shovelware) and be better in some regards (support, curation). And that's the only way they can go, since Steam is a quasi monopoly in the gaming market nowadays. They have to keep up with the comfort and have to excel in other ways to compete with it.

Go fuck yourself.

Somewhat stronger than that: if you have a license. There's no need to have paid for it and no need for proof unless specifically challenged (e.g. someone takes you to civic court for infringement and the court has to decide how much monetary damage was done and to whom).

No.

It's legal in most if not all of the world to download the games you have a license for from third-party sources. (It is of course illegal to provide third-party downloads, even if you magically have the ability to check if someone has a valid license.) In some places, it is illegal to use cracks to bypass DRM, but with GOG installers you won't need any.

I so wish you'd speak to me like that, Starlette.

You're the fluffiest.

There are still companies that make floppy disk drives, which can be gotten quite easily (and cheaply) from Amazon et al. Unless, by "in a few years", you meant "half a century or more from now", I don't think he'll have much trouble finding a DVD drive. ;)

Hi Starmaker, do not misunderstand me- I am not suggesting anything illegal nor am I suggesting anyone obtain something illegally.

You make one point clear though and I appreciate your honesty, you subscribe to to fullest that any ownership is merely an abstract.

You'd install and manage your games from the backup copies you've downloaded and have stored on hard disk or other backup storage media basically. If you don't have such backups, that's up to you to decide to do or not and how important it is to you of course. A terabyte or two of disk is pretty cheap these days and can store many hundreds or even thousands of GOG game and extras backups easily. My 530+ collection of games is around 800-900GB including some duplicates of different versions of installers. That's around $60-80 worth of hard disk space on high quality disks or probably even less than that on those "value" drives.

In such a hopefully unlikely event, there would no longer be any updates for any of the games however, and for games that do still receive updates you'd have to research online on a game by game basis whether the publisher of the game would be willing to provide license keys to the games you own of theirs on other platforms. Most likely some publishers would do so and others likely would not, and yet others would likely not even respond to inquiries nor acknowledge they even received the query.

There's no perfect scenario out there but there never was even in the 80s/90s/00s with disk/CD/DVD based games either. It's trusting both in a company's products and services and also in their longevity in varying degrees across the platforms, and taking the best measures available to have backup copies on reliable local media under your own control. Nothing lasts forever though, and I've rebought some games I owned on CD/DVD to have them on GOG or Steam working on modern computers over time. That may reiterate in the future, nobody can know for sure.

On the upside though, CDP SA is a publicly traded company and all of their financial information is available on their website. That in conjunction with many videos and other publicly available materials online suggests that they are highly successful and growing with no current signs of problems to be concerned about. The CDPR game studio is growing much larger as well and the profitability of both supplement each other to some degree in theory should it ever be any kind of concern in the future.