well so one possibility is that GOG never had the right to sell and therefor he has no ownership rights to it. Now if he had downloaded the game, GOG can't stop those copies from working. But you don't own the space on GOG's servers. If they can't even host the game, they have to remove it. Legally I don't think they have to do anything to the people who've bought it because they had no ownership rights because GOG had no seller's rights.

Morally they should have a news post and/or an e-mail sent out to everyone who bought Imperial Glory since the Mac version was being sold and offer refunds. It shouldn't have waited until someone noticed.

I agree with you guys as I mentioned earlier. The game should not have been pulled silently. Obviously somebody screwed up somehow here and they wound up selling something they had to pull. While I'm not especially pleased by screw ups, stuff happens and to me, it is how that stuff is handled once it has happened that matters most.

This reminds me of the "Cool Hand Luke" movie: "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

GOG needs to make better use of this site to communicate with its customers in my opinion and they need to be proactive in communicating when an error or problem like this occurs and they are aware of it. It is just good business and the right thing to do.

Well, it has felt good to vent and I appreciate the supportive comments. I have to agree too with those who caution that back ups avoid troubles like this. I ought to know better by now. Maybe this time I will learn my lesson! :D

Honestly is it really a surprise ?

If the service goes down, there is a licensing issue, or a legal issue (your country outlawing certain type of game), you have the risk of losing one or even all your games... that's nothing new, it has been true since the very beginning of digital distribution and it will only go worse the more we move toward "cloud" based solutions.

At least with DRM-free you have a way of backing-up your games in case something like that happens again.

Nah, folks on the Pirate Bay already backed them up for me.

The major difference being, this never happened to anybody on steam.

On GOG it happened a few times. At first, it was game soundtracks, now it's a game itself.

It's not good, to say the least.

I really need to get a nice external storage drive.

No it shouldn't, hence GOG offered a full refund.

It is good to remember though that the ability for "unlimited" re-downloads, that we take for granted, is an extra service they (and other stores like Steam etc.) are offering. There are digital stores that don't offer this, e.g. the SFI Super Bundle I bought from the Strategy First site, where they pretty much say you can re-download the purchased games only certain amount of times, so you should really take a backup of them. And that's what I did for that bundle, 29 games.

I think this was an unfortunate case, but thank god GOG games are DRM-free and they can be downloaded over a corporate network too (what I can't do with e.g. my Steam games). If I was to download all my GOG games, I'd really need all the download speed I can get, so I'd probably do it at my work over a 100Mbit/s line.

That said, I'm downloading and backing up my GOG games selectively. Mostly that if I've already downloaded (and installed) a GOG game, I archive it. No reason to delete the installer, if I've downloaded it already.

Two, keeping a backup of the backup. :)

I'm surprised if no one didn't yet come with the "you can always download your purchased games from PBay"-argument...

At least for people who had purchased it but not downloaded it that's true.

For people who have already downloaded it, it is a trickier question. It can be argued that they may have deleted their local copy because they expected to be able to re-download it at will. So as a sign of good will, it would be better to refund these too, if the customer wants a refund.

Look three posts up... (three post from yours)

Back up everything! I back up GOGs, GGs, Impulses, GMGs, Steams (praised be the nocds), indie bundles, I even back up the isos of PS1 and PS2 classics I get via PSN.

For me, the whole point of having games on GOG is that I can download them once and never visit the site again (if I so choose). I just store the installers with my digital photos and other irreplaceable personal files I already keep. I find it's not terribly different from having a digital book shelf or filing cabinet.

Actually...

;)

Out of interest what soundtracks are you talking about?

Atlantis series soundtracks are the ones I recall. They were removed even for people who already bought the game.