I've spent a lot of money on my PC and know that most people cannot spend that amount. I have 4TB of files on my PC, and multiple backups - but not many game backups. If I aimed to make backups of all my games, I've have to buy many more TB of storage for them, and then double it for a redundant backup.

And owning 1,000+ games isn't nearly as big of a financial feat as you seem to think it is, if a person has been collecting them in big sales, bundles, and giveaways since the advent of digital game retailers.

Because I downloaded it and installed it.

The reason for backing things up is that people can't know whether a game will become unavailable from the download source in the future. They can't know whether it will be a 15 MB game or a 100 GB game that they'll need a backup of, so, they have to backup everything, including every 100+ GB game they have. One of the many games they might backup being 15 MB doesn't help alleviate the difficulty in backing up 100+ GB games.

I think that's something GoG's customers should pressure them to change. If they start deteriorating their service and principles in one area, it should be expected that it could happen to other areas, too.

That's basically only one if: If GoG shut-down. I think that GoG's finances are public information, due to being a publicly traded company. If they comes into a financial situation where the business is at risk, people should become aware of it by public reporting even if GoG didn't announce it, themselves. And so, people should have warning to take the measures they need to protect their games.

But I don't think GoG would shut-down without lengthy warning (and as I said, hopefully they never need to shut-down). It would be incompetence and irresponsibility if they suddenly realized they were going to close only 30 days before the fact, and if they failed to notify people before then. I also wonder if they could avoid legal consequences if they shut-down in an irresponsible manner like that.

SNES Version can be downloaded again. Just tested it.

Would prefer the old Doxbox version, too. :(

I'm guessing based on the message on the product page, both versions are supposed to be available: So, they'll need to just provide installers for the DOS version in the extras section or something. "Never attribute to malice..."

Depends how big you need.

I have total 7 TB reserved for my GOG offline installers (one 5TB drive and another 2TB drive, dividing the installers on them), and right now I am going beyond their storage space, ie. I should buy a third hard drive, or replace the 2TB drive with e.g. a 5TB drive, pushing the storage to 10TB total...

Having the installers divided to two (or more) HDDs complicates things somewhat when using e.g. gogrepoc.py, ie. I have to divide the gogrepo manifest file manually to two (or more) manifest files, and then run gogrepo twice on the two separate hard drives...

Sure it would be nice to keep all the installers on one big-ass HDD, but I don't think there are that big 2.5" USB-powered HDDs, and even if there was, it doesn't feel nice to retire the perfectly working 5TB and 2TB HDDs just because the collection can't fit into them, barely.

I have several older working 2TB 3.5" SATA HDDs in the closet, I guess I should take them into use and divide my GOG collection on them.

I still need to research how to make one big volume out of several (USB) HDDs, where I could always extend that volume simply by adding yet another hard drive to the mix... I know it can be done, both in Windows and Linux, but if you do it without any parity to maximize the storage space, then it is even more vulnerable than dividing the files to several separate hard drives manually, as losing one of the hard drives would make you lose the whole volume, ie. all your GOG game installers. Not just the ones which were on that specific hard drive.

Oh well, what would be life without some obstacles?

I hate to say it, but the exact reverse is likely to be true. If you know you're going to be insolvent in 30 days time, in most jurisdictions you need to stop trading immediately to preserve creditor's funds. Keeping the business running for 30 days (during which time you won't be making sales) just so that people can download files (which will cost the business money) would be considered to be grossly irresponsible in most Western countries. I'm not sure what the Polish law is on this, but in the UK, the Directors could be held personally liable for the costs.

Anyway, long story short, if you can, back-up your installers. If you can't, keep fingers crossed that things like this don't happen.

DRM free means you buy it, own it, and are responsible for it. If you do not backup yourself, then you are in the same boat as any other store, except you pay more and have a limited catalog. GOG are not an archive site, they are not good old games, they are here to make money nothing more. They can switch off the servers now without any problems, only you will lose out, and it’s your responsibility! To note, they did turn off once before already.
If you can’t backup, then save yourself some money and just buy on steam, for most games you can buy keys at a fraction of the price
Again, GOg is not here to provide any service, the library is only there to allow download, they could turn it off any time. There is no security unless it is 100% under your control.

That may well be the case (and many people do that simply because the average is often much less than the largest) but ultimately it's the whole point of buying here vs Steam. To borrow from a previous analogy, it's like going into a high street store, buying 100x DVD's then leaving them all in the store "because I don't have the room for a bookshelf at home" then complaining when they disappear if the store closes, or if the store replaces them with inferior versions. "Lack of room" may be an understandable justification but it then raises the question why bother buying DVD's at all just to leave them in the store vs subscribing to Netflix?...

As pds41 said, that's actually normal and at that stage external creditors are usually in charge not the people who passionately started the store. See the number of travel / holiday companies that went out of business without warning even to non-senior staff who worked there. GOG's user agreement (17.3) simply says "we will try to give you notice" not "we guarantee" so no legal comeback. Also, parent companies do not have to go out of business to change something about an unprofitable subsidiary. If CDPR remains profitable whilst GOG make increasing losses, it's entirely possible that CDPR may want to change something about GOG's core business model in future without going out of business, or even sell it off to others who have the capacity and will to run it as a loss-leader to gain more customers for their own stores (Epic Games, Microsoft, etc)). "Never say never".

At the end of the day no-one's forced to back anything up, but the ability to do so really is the entire Unique Selling Point of the store. And there's plenty of reasons to backup anyway other than store-closure (eg, to avoid classic versions being 'replaced' by remasters, avoid GTA-4 style forced removal of soundtracks due to expired licensing, keep an older more desired version of a 'evolving' game that's had unwanted gameplay changes added in a new patch in an era where GOG refuses to make older installers available, etc, none of which give you a nice long advance warning or lets you "rollback" offline installers to older versions).

Maybe it is useful to mention that GOG explicitly mentions in their terms of use what they would do in case of a permanent shut down (notify every user via e-mail at least 60 days in advance).

Why did I read that? My life will never be the same anymore.

That does make it slightly more likely that there will be some notice (but as timppu says - there will be a lot of people trying to download a lot in that time - will it fall over?)

However, let's say GoG don't give notice if it happens because CDP goes bankrupt.

What can anyone do? Take them to court? Perhaps, but then you're in the wonderful world of insolvency law. I'm going to base this on UK Insolvency Law as I don't know the Polish equivalent, so take the below with a big pinch of salt, and as just one example of what could happen.

I'm not an expert in Polish laws, but if it was the UK, you might win in court. This won't be clear until months down the line, and the court isn't likely to issue an injunction to turn the servers back on. So, you're more likely to win some compensation. This all sounds good, until you discover that the compensation is an unsecured debt of the company. This means that you get nothing until the secured debt has been repaid (things like bank loans etc). Realistically, you'll get a couple of pennies in the pound for any compensation.

Just to be clear, I see no evidence that there's an immediate risk of close-down/insolvency - CDP is in good financial shape, especially after the release of Cyberpunk last year. However, I remember the 2010 fake site shutdown, and was annoyed enough at the time that I had bought a game the week before that I hadn't downloaded yet. With a much larger library today, I would be raging.

Once bitten, twice shy.

Why would anyone do anything? People who are actually interested in backing up their library should already have it backed up (because why wouldn't you?). I don't understand why someone who cares so much about their game collection that they would sue a company for shutting down their servers prematurely wouldn't actually bother backing anything up after purchase. It doesn't make logical sense to me.

Remember Telltale?
I can still download the games I bought from them from their homepage.
It IS legal to offer that service even after you went bankrupt.

But your suggestion is a good one anyway.