I was thinking maybe GOG should offer the option (for a nominal fee) to send some of the games on your shelf in one o more blu-ray discs, this would help expand GOG to markets that have shitty internet speeds and would also help many people have a backup copy just in case your hard disk crashes, an EMP attack erases it or GOG is bought by an (obviously evil) mega corporation. Many people might say "But i do not have a blu-ray disc reader on my PC", well, I remember not so long ago when DVD players were the new kid in the block and I thought "Those are nice, but bet I will never have one on my home computer". Hell, I remember saying the very same thing about CD-ROMs!!! >_< So having a backup you cannot use now makes sense since it is given you will have one in the future (unless you are brainwashed by the media into thinking video games are the root of all the modern evils that befall mankind). Before someone tells me "Blu-ray media is expensive" please take a look here, at the present time it is more expensive to buy (and burn) 5 single layer DVDs than one single layer Blu-ray. Someone might say "but sending a disc from polland to the USA is going to cost more than it is worth", if that is the case it would be a matter of finding a service that burns and mails them inside the USA, I think fedex those that atm with DVDs, so there must be at least one service inside the whole usa that can do it with blu-rays disc.

GOG is a games download service for a reason. Selling discs worldwide (not only for North America...) will take forever to arrive and it will be more expensive. Even with a slow Internet connection, it will be faster, since most of the games are really small... If you can afford a Blu-ray reader/burner, why don't you get a better Internet connection? It is better to download the games and backup the games yourself in the media you want.

I think some marketing to promote GOG users to back up the installers would be far more effective and worth GOG's resources.

And be redundant with the backups, I've had an external hard drive die on me on one occasion and a USB drive go bad. This is why it is a good idea to spread your data around instead of having a single point of failure. The more important it is the more redundant you should be.

And don't forget about all the patching they've been doing lately.

It seems possible for some kind of level of fee, but at the level of expected popularity it seems like it would cost too much.

Also, how would it be better from burning them yourself?

ATM many people do not have blu-ray burners (even if they can read said discs). There is many people that have downloaded the games as they have bought them, played them and (probably) deleted them from their hard drives and have quite a large library now, so downloading them (for backup purposes and/or because there was an update) might be a time consuming effort. But with discs on the mail, no matter how many weeks it takes, it is effortless.

Hm, well if the burning and mailing can be outsourced, I suppose it might be achievable.

My initial reaction was "Physical backup disc media? Pffft, what is this, the 90s?", but the more I think about it, the better your suggestion sounds. In fact, I would probably order such a backup disc from GOG at some point, depending on the fee. Earlier when people suggested that GOG should sell their games also physically (even separate games), that doesn't sound such a hot idea to me. But a physical backup service, why not?

Considering that I have 400+ games in my GOG account, backing them up myself is indeed lots of work, especially as the GOG downloader client does not have a "download all the games you have in GOG" button. Even clicking 400+ games on the current client sounds a lot of work I wouldn't want to do, and I think the client probably would choke anyway during the first dozen clicks (has anyone tested how many entries you can put into the downloader client at the same time? I recall having some problems before when I clicked quite many entries into it.).

Those who have only a few games from GOG probably couldn't care less about such a service, I guess.

But first GOG should implement a "Download all your games+extras at once"-button into their client.

Which I feel they are not willing to do, because that might make the the burden on their download servers shoot through the roof, as lots of people would try to backup their vast GOG collection, even many times when many games in their collection have received updates. I presume GOG wants people mostly just download individual games they are going to play right there (not e.g. download all their games over and over again once a month or so), just to keep the burden on servers at a moderate level. And keep local backups of those individual games so that they don't unnecessarily download them several times.

I've been wanting a similar "Download all" button also in the Steam client, but it seems to be missing there too, probably for similar reasons. Plus, the Steam client seems to choke easily if I try to download lots of games at the same time, it becomes very unresponsive and it becomes near impossible to start more downloads.

+1. Love the idea.

GOG is my backup. I never have to fiddle for hours trying to make my old favourite game work on the latest windows. :)

Why? The point is to save space. You download only when you're going to play the game and once you've downloaded the installer you back it up, not all at once.

For people who'd like to keep a local (snapshot) backup of all their GOG games.

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/just_a_suggestion_backup_your_gogs/page1

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_screws_up_again/page1

Or, as I said, alternatively offer a service to receive the purchased games in a BR or DVD discs, for an extra fee.