Timboli: And like I mentioned in my last post, many DRM-Free stores owe their survival to GOG's impact with DRM-Free. So you cannot look at them in isolation. And I have already explained before why I don't spend much money at ZP and haven't for ages now, and I haven't spent a brass razoo at FireFlower games, despite grabbing a few of their freebies. Looking at what FF has available, and their pricing, they are just not an option for me, and I suspect many others, or you would hear about them more. That would not change for me with GOGs demise.

Both FF and ZP appeal to a certain demographic when it comes to customers. For FF especially, it is not very similar to the GOG demographic of customers, and with ZP it is very limited.

The market is very different now to what it was 14 to 15 years ago, which means niche stores like FF and ZP can sort of survive now, though it is not clear on how well.

Cavalary: Well, while the EULA says the account is exclusive to you and can't be transferred, there seems to be evidence that it can be "inherited" on GOG.

SargonAelther: "Collector's meeting"? Ha! First time I hear of such a silly concept.

rtcvb32: They are worth more than the zero the collection is worth when you die.

Maybe i'm not expressing it well enough. You buy games on GoG or Steam. The games you get a 'license' for you to play and have said game, but it's non-transferable (but it should be).

Ultimately what does that mean? It means a database somewhere has an entry that gives you permission to access said file(s), it's less than 1k of data that you're spending dozens or hundreds of dollars to be given 'access', but is DRM in it's own right where the companies would rather flip you the bird rather than let you having invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on games to give to someone while alive (or after you're dead). Might as well /dev/null the entry because it's the same thing at that point as it's treated. You might have an email that said you once paid for something that no one has the right to and your rights to it are pretty close to zilch too.

Cavalary: FF was launched in 2012, ZP in 2014. Incidentally, those are the years of GOG's major shifts, first away from just old games, then dropping flat pricing and putting growth above values in general. So if we go by your idea that FF and ZP survive because the market changed, it means your question would only apply to GOG's years as "Good Old Games". In which case yeah, "collectors" probably played an important part. But I'd say that "pirates" also did, because one thing early GOG did was really see "piracy" as their competition, not any other store, and try to persuade those who "pirated" games (and got them DRM free as a result) that it's actually worth paying for a legal copy, as it will be better (thanks to extra goodies, patching (possibly custom work) and support) and have no downsides (like DRM). And they were quite successful in that endeavor, which success also did help the small stores, but probably helped the big ones more, and eventually ended up biting them, because as you can also see on here when somebody complains about GOG, now the general mindset isn't that if you don't like the terms of purchase you take to the high seas and the industry loses out and therefore is pressured to cater to you, but that if you don't like one store's terms you have to compare them to other stores, so it's a race to the bottom, things can and do keep getting worse as long as the notable players go in that direction, and they do, with only the industry gaining, and its biggest players in particular.

BreOl72: Maybe some people here misunderstood my comment.

Of course a "collection" of lots of zeros and ones on a HDD is also a "collection"...viewed from a pure technical standing point.

But I dare any of these "collectors" to go to an actual collector's meeting, and - when asked what they collect - to point to their HDD(s) and answer: "I collect video games...and here is my huge collection!"

I guarantee you: the looks, that that statement will earn you, will be worth the attendance fee a thousandfold.

Timboli: I only buy at GOG because they let me own the games I buy. That ownership to me, means I can pass it on to my family, but not share with others using duplication.

Ryan333: Well, no, because that was GOG's target audience in the beginning. And that worked fantastically early on and is how they gained their initial success.

GOG's original premise was that they would be an "official" storefront for collectors who wanted to legitimately acquire games that were otherwise considered abandonware and have the added benefit of those games being tweaked, patched and hacked to run on modern systems -- and all wrapped up in a convenient offline installer with no DRM (yes... the golden years). Early GOG had no designs to sell even semi-modern titles, as evidenced by one of their original goals for selling every game at either $5.99 or $9.99 (USD).

While some people just bought a couple old favorite games, my (purely anecdotal) experience is that a lot more people bought a very large number of games, whether it was to have the complete collection of all their favorite series, because they now had the chance to play all games they didn't have the hardware to run back in the day, or even because they now had the means to convert all their physical collection into a digital format with modern system compatibility all within a single storefront.

That worked for a while, until GOG started running out of good old games that they could keep adding to their library. At that point, they had two choices. They could put the store into a sort of "maintenance mode" -- maintaining their original vision of being the go-to store front for classic game collectors, adding an occasional new release once in a blue moon, but basically not growing any further. Or they could define a new target audience that went beyond "just collectors" and tried to pull in mainstream gamers. Whether that decision was for good or ill is an entirely different discussion.

While GOG's early success was definitely due to collectors, I think a more interesting question is: "Could GOG continue to survive if they ONLY stayed focused on classic game collectors (i.e. only games that would otherwise be considered abandonware and ensuring compatibility with modern systems for all released games)".

neumi5694: We actually don't own these games (Try to gift a offline installer to someone, that's not possible. The game will still be registered to your account).

But having offline installers of games that work without having an account is the closest thing to ownership that we get these days.