Radiance1979: I don't see GoG dying out soon, as it won't seem that my steady supply of food will dry out any time soon. Still, would it be smart to consider the eventuality that suddenly you would be in need of a game back up ? This sounds so, like maybe if that situation does occur gaming would be the last thing on my mind??
Stores and services do close their doors even without worldwide apocalypses.
I think someone already mentioned e.g. what happened to DotEmu and Desura (people rushed to download their stuff from those sites when they learned they are going to close, DotEmu gave the customers several months to download their stuff why Desura was more spotty on that).
I've experienced the same also with Strategy First's own store from where I bought the SFI Super Bundle with lots of games, but I think Strategy First made it clear in the beginning that you ARE supposed to download and keep all your game installers from them, and they are not going to provide a download service where you can redownload your games as many times as you want, from here to eternity. (I don't recall if there was a time limit or count limit, how long or how many times you can download the games).
So, when those stores closed their doors, people didn't have more important things in their minds instead of securing their purchased games.
So I guess there are several ways to approach this:
1. You download your games beforehand, maybe bit by bit, when it is still easy and everyone is not rushing to download their stuff at the same time.
2. You decide to wait until it seems it might be a good idea to download your stuff, and hope it will be like DotEmu where you are given a relatively long period to download your stuff, and you can still download your stuff. And of course that you even receive the news in time that the store is closing its doors, and don't just sleep over it. I wonder how many former DotEmu customers didn't even hear about the demise of the store, those who might have even cared about it?
3. You just don't care enough about the games, ie. it is not that important to you even if you lost your access to them at some point. Who cares, you probably don't even care for your older purchases anymore at that point, or if you do, you can always buy them again from some other store (if they are available elsewhere), or try to download them from hazy torrent sites (possibly with embedded malware).
So there is no right answer to this, it just depends how much you care for your purchases, and what you believe will happen in the future. Downloading all your games now can be seen either as a smart move, or as a sign that games are too important part of your life and you wear a tinfoil hat, scared of the end of the world (and your gaming service).
Falci: It would help if there was an official easy-back-everything-up solution to use.
I presume GOG doesn't want to officially promote the idea of downloading all your games, for various reasons like;
- Naturally it causes extra stress to GOG servers (the idea of using p2p/bittorrent would help with this though).
- They don't want it to make too easy for pirate sharers to download and keep their GOG game collections up to date, people who may be selling those games to others.
They prefer people would do it the Steam-way, ie. download only games they are going to play now, one by one. Close to the "games as a service" idea, even if you still have the ability to download all your games too, at least theoretically.