I'll just torrent cracked copies on internet duh.

If Steam were to go down, GOG would be first. Do you expect for real that the King of DD would go down before its copycats?

Never thought about it before. But I will start backing up my games soon.

Yes, it did for me. That's one of the examples which reinforce my behaviour. The bankruptcy was announced 4 months ago and the site is still up. This is quite a bit of time to create a backup of all the games.

On the other hand, I don't think I ever got a message from Desura about this, which means that if I wasn't on gaming forums I probably wouldn't have known about it, and could potentially have lost the games. (Potentially because we still don't know what will happen with these games. For all we know they could be accessible for years to come.)

Still, as I said, it wouldn't have been a major source of grief to me even if I couldn't download these games. The games I care about are those I do play (or my kids do), and that's where GOG's benefit comes in, because even if GOG dies nothing will happen to these games, but on the other hand if Steam dies I'll lose access to those games.

The fact that GOG is still around affects me so that I don't feel the need to keep secondary local backups of my GOG games. So I have them only on one external hard drive at the moment, and if any of them would at some point become corrupted, or I even lost that whole HDD... oh well, I guess I would redownload them all from GOG.

However, if and when I'd even start to think otherwise about GOG's future, or for some reason felt I wouldn't care to visit GOG website anymore (like is the case with DotEmu, GamersGate etc. for me), I'd certainly take secondary backups etc., ie. consider my local backups higher priority, similarly to my personal digital home photos, videos etc.

At this point, I consider my GOG games on the GOG servers as my secondary backups. If something happens to my local GOG game installers, I revert to those GOG server backups. So it isn't necessarily either or, you can have both. :)

Which is the point he is making, if you have downloaded your games from Gog, it doesn't matter if they go as they do not require that connection. But there is no talking to a steam fanboy who appears to support piracy.

I have bunch of games on Desura, uPlay, Origins and Battlenet. Also I have 40+ games here to boot. Calling people fanboy when they're talking with logic reaffirms my opinion that GOG lunatics are indeed... awful.

Please never ever reply to my post again. Wasting my time arguing with someone with this kind of education duh.

Two words: external harddrive.

I have all the files (including goodies) of every game I bought on GOG stored on an external HDD. Since I don't really use Galaxy, this is the fastest way to install any game I own without having to (re)download it.

Who said GOG will go down first? It all depends on how both companies play the game of survival out. If Valve were to make a very terrible move, and somehow, everyone using Steam complained about it and voted with their wallets (even if I never saw that happening even with Valve who are so full of it, what a bunch of paid Valve employees those Steam fanboys are), Steam may go down even before GOG does. Don't be so certain that GOG will fall first.

GOG being a copycat? Hmph. Not even a day am I going to believe that. The biggest thing that separates GOG from Steam is simple: GOG is a service that sells you games that you are owning for real, while Steam is a service that allows you to rent games from it at full price instead of a low-low price tag for all time. Can't see where copycatting is here. Copycats might refer best to Origin and Uplay however.

And as someone else said, you missed the entire point I was making. If Steam dies, so are your games. If GOG dies, rest assured that your games will work and install endlessly even after its death.
According to a post on Desura: http://www.desura.com/news/may-27th-update

Where is this bankruptcy you're talking about?

Bad Juju owner of Desura filed for bankruptcy in June and pulled Desura down with it.

It was posted all over net months ago: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/06/05/desura-bankruptcy-bad-juju-games/

Edit: You can read more about it in a very long gog thread here: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/bad_juju_owner_of_desura_and_indie_royale_filed_for_bankruptcy/page1

I see. Since I wasn't on the internet for quite a long time, I thought the little link on Desura's front page is the end to everything. Thanks for the note.

Know that you mention it, I better work on getting these games on Desura downloaded as separate installers and uploaded to a cloud service and burned to DVDs. Thank you again for waking me up.

I'm not sure what you're referring to by the price tags. If that's a comparison of GOG and Steam prices, Steam's are definitely lower, especially if the Steam games are bought from third parties like bundle sites. In this respect an indefinite "rental" can still be a good deal.

On an all-time basis, Steam's price are just overrated. Even during sales, when do sales come? Oh, twice a year on all the games that weren't released recently, much alike everyone else. I don't care if Steam's prices take a nosedive during the sales, the sales are of no business to me at all. What is of business are the all-time prices, and I'm not paying $60 for a rental anymore when movies can be rented for much less than that and owned for slightly more than the rental price properly. I'm not paying $60 for a rental when I could buy the same game for the same price, but this time allowing me to actually own it and do whatever the heck I want without a third party client standing between me and my game.

To answer your question, its a comparison of price and value of GOG vs Steam, where the answer to the question "Is it DRM-free?" alters the final value drastically. GOG wins in that regard.

Isn't using a cloud backup just as bad? To my mind they are less likely to be reliable than storefronts, as they provide it for free (or really cheap), so very little business drive to keep it running. At least with stores, they would struggle to sell. Not to mention, anything even remotely attached to me is not going on anyone else's servers. I am sure there is all the normal blurb about how they don't data mine, drive for advertising, and then find a loop hole in that, or a VW as its now called.

Yeah. Somehow, having the 1.4 terabytes of my GOG games in a 3rd party cloud doesn't quite sound like the solution I'm looking for... after all, then I'd still have to redownload the games if I want to use them, so why not do that from the official servers instead? :)

Not to mention that my cable modem connection's upload speed is far slower than the download speed, so uploading my GOG games to the cloud would probably take months, considering downloading them over a 10Mbps connection took something like two weeks in all.

I see very little benefit to using 3rd party cloud services for storing terabytes of personal data, especially data that is quite often updated, like the GOG game installers.

DRM-free hardly alters the answer for most people, and legitimately so (I'll explain in a second).

As for Steam prices and sales, it looks to me like you're speaking as someone who's not a Steam customer (or you'd know that there are hundreds of games on discount each week). I bought Bioshock Infinite for $1. I bought Deus Ex: HR for $1. I bought Shogun: Total War Collection, Medieval II: Total War Collection and Viking: Battle for Asgard for $1. Just a few examples. (None of these purchases were on Steam itself, but they were of Steam keys). If someone has any interest in these games and doesn't buy them because they're "rental" then he's obviously not making a rational decision.

Now, about the retail price. Someone who buys at full price is typically someone who intends to play the game immediately. The person who "rents" the game plays it and finishes it, no problem. Most likely he won't replay it in the future, because there will always be new worthwhile games, and only a small subset of games are so worth replaying that they'll trump the new ones. If he wants to replay it, most likely the game will still be available. Games I "rented" 8 years ago are still available for me to play.

So basically, the extra value of a DRM-free purchase in this respect (just "owning" vs. "indefinite rental", disregarding other benefits of DRM-free or Steam) is for the small number of games that you're going to replay, in the case that Steam is no longer around when you want to replay them. That's like 1% extra value. Let's exaggerate it a lot, give it 10%. That means that if you buy games on Steam for 10% less than on GOG, it's worth it.

In general I'd say that "owning" has extra value only for people who tend to buy few games and replay the majority of them over long periods of time. These people are a minority. For the majority of people, "owning" vs. "renting indefinitely" has very little extra value.