Yeah - someone stepped in and bought the rump of Telltale if I remember correctly, who then kept the servers running.

Ultimately it comes down to how much risk people are prepared to accept and whether they want to have local backups.


I agree. Although from a lot of the threads on this forum, I'm inclined to the view that many of the users aren't logical beings!

Because of the effort it takes if you have lots of games (and also would like to keep your collection up to date), and because of the hard drive space it may require. I can full well understand even people who are interested in keeping their games, may keep postponing the project of backing up their games for those two reasons. (Installing and learning to use e.g. gogrepo is still some effort, even if much less so than manually downloading hundreds of games from the web page).

My GOG game installer collection is about now exceeding 7 terabytes in size, and that is only the English Windows versions of installers. Currently I have divided the collection to two USB hard drives, a 5TB and 2TB one, and now I am trying to think how I should proceed from here. Probably just buy another 5TB USB hard drive and use it as the third place where to divide my local GOG installer collection (or at least replace the older 2TB HDD with that new 5TB HDD, for the time being, granting me extra 3TB of space).

And no I don't have my GOG installers on any secondary local backup, so if I lost those two hard drives, then I would lose my local GOG installers. I don't fret about that for now because as long as GOG is operational, I consider my games on GOG servers as my secondary backup.

If GOG stated they are going to close the store, then yes I would start making a local backup of my backups, just like I've already done for e.g. my DotEmu and Strategy First Superbundle games which I can't download from their online stores anymore.

The thing is: Why would individuals who consider it too much of a hassle backing everything up believe it would be less of a hassle backing everything up before GOG goes out of business? Do you know why i'm struggling with the logic here?

I never really understood the hassle anyway. The way i do it is following: I bought two 10 TB external hard drives. Once they are full i'll buy another one, then another one, etc. I don't really understand the hassle with downloading either. i click download and organize the files into folders once they're downloaded. I get that some people may have a different view on it though. Different strokes for different folks.

It is not about believing it will be "less of a hassle" in the future. It is human nature to postpone things that in some way feel "insurmountable" or at least a considerable amount of effort.

Like emptying your garage from all the trash that has accumulated there for years, or building up that big and complicated IKEA piece of furniture, or me finally trying to reinstall Rasperry Pi OS for my RPi4 which is in a bit broken state at the moment (I need to copy out some files, reinstall the OS from the scratch etc... meh.).

So people may be thinking they'll start backing up their GOG game installers next week, just like they've kept promising themselves for the last three years.

I have close to 2200 GOG games. Downloading them manually from the web pages would mean about 56734342243 mouse clicks, and on top of that all the waiting for them to download.

And I don't consider that as the biggest hurdle anyway, it would be even more cumbersome to try to keep those installers up to date, tracking down which games and files have changed especially if the GOG "updated and new" report system does not always work reliably. I've tried that back when I had something like 500 GOG games, and it was quite awful and time-consuming already back then.

Anyway, gogrepoc.py eases the pain especially for the latter a lot, but installing and learning gogrepo (as well as python with the needed modules) is also some effort and new learning when you do it the first time.

Now my main issue is that I need to expand my local HDD space somehow, and using gogrepo with several hard drives at the same time complicates things (having to divide the manifest file manually and run gogrepo several times with those partial manifest files, etc...). It can be done, but I don't want to do it that often, maybe once every 2-3 months or so.

I think i can see the problem in both of your examples. The reason i never had any issue with this is that i always backed up everything i bought immediately and also did the same with updates. Therefore i never really had anything to postpone (even though i cannot confirm from personal experience that this desire to postpone is natural either way). It makes sense that people who never downloaded anything after purchase may have to invest some time into downloading everything.

I must call you when I have yet another IKEA furniture waiting assembly for weeks, and my wife nagging to me about it. I am sure you could sort it out in a jiffy.

Man, that IKEA bunk bed + table combination furniture really was a bitch to assemble, heavy and complicated as heck. I think it took me two months before I finally got it fully assembled, when my wife started suggesting a divorce over it.

"IKEA - Divorcing People"

(no one remembers the old "Nokia - Connecting People" phone advertisements?)

EDIT: I think it was this particular piece of furniture. Don't buy it if you want to keep your sanity, and marriage!

https://www.ikea.com/fi/fi/p/smastad-parvisaenky-valkoinen-valkoinen-ja-tyoepoeytae-ja-4-laatikkoa-s09392094/

EDIT 2: Now that I remember, that particular piece of furniture must be cursed anyway. I ordered a delivery of the furniture to home, but only to the front door because I figured I can easily carry the pieces myself to the 5th floor to our apartment with the lift, saving some of the delivery costs there.

It just so happened that the lift happened to be out of service that particular day. So yeah, I spent the whole evening carrying the heavy parts to fifth floor alone. The heaviest packages were something like 30kg a piece and quite cumbersome to hold, and I think I climbed the stairs to the fifth floor for like ten times or so, carrying something heavy each time.

When i told the delivery men that our lift is broken, they just laughed and said "Good luck", and drove away.

Funny thing is my parents actually do always call me when they buy something new which is complex to assemble or when they want their attic reorganized, so you're not too off here, haha.

It's not how I remember it and also their game rights went to different buyers of which none seem to be interested in keeping old Telltale customers happy.
SkunkApe (or something like that) rerelaserd Sam & Max for example, but they have nothing to do with Batman or The Walking Dead.
Still all the old stuff is available on the homepage, so there must be a legal way to do it without violating the contracts.
You can't buy any games there however, THAT would be a violation for sure.

Yeah I am much better at breaking things to pieces than assembling them back together. A whole different set of skills is needed for each.

I tried it and it stops half way. Well not even half way. :-/

Are you trying to say/claim that it was all a stupid mistake on GOG's part? Read that bit you posted:
"Both SNES and DOS versions are now available. You can switch between them in GOG Galaxy."

That means that, atm, the ONLY way to get/play the GOG dos version now is via galaxy....and that was likely how GOG wanted to set it up.

Now I admit.....I was sorta ok with the MP portions being locked to galaxy as I don't play MP and the SP portions of nearly all games are available outside of galaxy, but now it seems that one needs to use galaxy in order to play a SP version of a game one has bought(the game in the thread topic).....and it seems (key word) highly likely it was done on purpose.

Now I wonder: how many more game versions they'll lock to galaxy only usage in the future?

(side note: this reminds me of when GOG switched to ScummVM for a number of games, and removed "unneeded exe files" as another user mentioned ITT)

That's my complaint. I don't use Galaxy therefore I am without access to the DOS version.
It's not under extras.
The installer shrinked from around 370MB (CD DOS version) to 15MB (installer with a SNES ROM).

Oh well, let us know what response you get back from support!

My guess it will possibly be something like "Use Galaxy!"