Just make sure you download them and back them up yourself because they certainly can revoke your ability to download them from their servers, is what they are implying here.
Sure, just like other brick and mortar stores can refuse to give you backups of a DVD you own.
As long as the installer works offline this is just as good. It’s up to you to store it in whichever format you prefer so that you don’t lose it - hard drive, thumb drive, DVD…
If you nuke your computers hard drive with the installers of your games, or you step on your blu rays with games and break them, then you lose access to them. As it’s always been, no matter the format?
yeah, keep backups.
i’ve got some a few old games bought on floppies or cds that are knackered now. A few of them i’ve ended up buying again from gog.
Luckily there are some friendly people with eye patches and peglegs on the internet backing them up for you.
“It’s not piracy, it’s federated backups!”
I like this. I’m not stealing it, just copying it for personal use.
Good luck finding a semi obscure 15 year old game on the high seas.
You might be surprised. Plenty of sites backing up whatever they can. Try archive.org and various abandonware sites.
Or, I might not be surprised at all. You might find Borderlands for the next 20 years, but what about the games that only sold like 40k copies to begin with?
At this point we’re just anecdote vs anecdote, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised during most of my attempts.
I’m not going to try and sift through collections on abandonware sites and try to cross reference them against known copies sold. The only person who can speak to your personal white whale is you.
archive.org has many gigs worth of 90s era “900 in 1” shareware/freeware CDs on it. Games that never sold copies and were just stolen personal projects shoved onto one disc.
Recently I found multiple users on SoulSeek that collectively have nearly the whole discography of a relatively unknown japanese house music label, Far East Recordings. The main artist Soichi Terada’s work on the Ape Escape game soundtracks (only thing he’s known for in the US) is easily available as are his CD releases, but there’s a ton of vinyl only releases (he was prolific in the late 80s through mid 90s) that I could find evidence existed but couldn’t actaully find the music anywhere. On top of that he did a lot of collabs with japanese artists that just don’t exist online, and I found a ton of their stuff on SoulSeek as well.
Also, be the change. I’ve backed up all the CDs from my childhood, and put them up on the archive if I couldn’t easily find them on it already. When I find time I’ll do the same with all the old freeware games I downloaded back in the early 2000’s. Keep backups. I’ve got easily accessible backups going back to my family’s Windows XP, and I have our Win 98 drives whenever I decide to buy the right adapters.
Anyway, hope you find what you’re looking for.
homeoftheunderdogs used to be awesome in like the year 2001. But now I think it only has either freeware or links to a google searches where the fiiles used to be.
soulseek, yes that is cool , some extreme niches covered on there. That probably is better than napster was in some ways.
I found a copy of 1995’s ‘Desktop Toys’ on archive.org, and ran it on linux with wine literally yesterday.
Windows 11 has an incompatability with 32 bit progams apparently.
I see your point, but I think we’re in better shape than you estimate.
That said, we could always be in bettar shape, and as more is created, the less complete archives can be.
You can find obscure games going back to the Amiga pretty easily nowadays.
I used to play this fun game in the early 1990s. I had tried to find it again for a every couple years on and off. Now it simply runs in the browser.
Will they also help during a zombie apocalypse? Asking for a friend…
In case of zombie apocalypse, your best friends will probably be a bicycle (to get away from the zombies in almost any terrain and road condition, not be without industrial fuel the next day, and be able to do needed repairs with rough tools and scraps that can be found), a hunting knife, and maybe a crossbow if you can find one (weapons that can be sharpened and reused, and crossbow allowing random joes to just make piercing sticks (again with scraps that can be found anywhere) that work like an arrow, again weapons that do not depend on industrial infrastructure that will not be available anymore). Games that need electricity would be extremely hard to use, it’s better to buy card decks that have multiple rule sets for different games to play, like french decks and tarot, maybe a tabletop set that also has multiple games.
Well yes, of course. They sell you an installer and it’s on you to download it. That the servers could be turned off at one point in the future because the company doesn’t have money any more should be clear. It’s on you to save the installer on your own hard drive, not the companies!
The missing context here (I think) is that California passed a law saying that digital storefronts (like steam and gog) can’t say things like “buy game” because you aren’t actually gaining ownership of the game, but instead just buying a license to access it. Some people were questioning if this law should apply to gog since their games are drm free and can be freely installed on any compatible devices once you download the installer.
It should because their use agreement makes it clear that you don’t own the games but are licensing them. That’s pretty much why they had to clarify what they said I’d imagine. IMO, proving the point of the law, really.
This is equally true for almost any game ever sold, including physical ones. You only ever own a license that specifies what you can and cannot do with the game. The difference is in what this license is tied to, for example either a physical copy of a given game or an account that can be remotely deactivated taking away all your games. In GOG’s case once you grab the installer, the game license cannot be easily forcibly revoked, just as with the physical copy.
It doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t change the point that people think they own digital goods when they don’t. GOG may have a more consumer friendly system in place but it doesn’t change what has happened with people’s music, movies, shows, games and music in games at these digital storefronts, where people have clicked “Buy X” and later on, it’s no longer in their libraries anymore. This has happened even when the business still exists and is still providing digital goods.
With GOG, you can buy any game, and you’ll have files to keep. Once you have the installer, you can keep that forever.
Even if your GOG account is hacked, banned, and GOG goes out of business, you can forever install your game onto any compatible machine, even offline, and play the game.
That’s what GOG does differently.
It’s like buying a physical game, except there’s no disc. They can’t revoke your access or deactivate your ability to play the game.
I know that. That still misses the point. The point of the law is to clarify that on digital storefronts that you make purchases for licensed digital goods, that you can’t imply to the consumer that they actually own those goods. It doesn’t matter if there is an offline installer. It doesn’t matter if you can ‘keep your installers forever’.
How does an offline installer from GOG differ from the offline installer provided on a CD/DVD?
The license for the DVD version is with the actual disk, the license for the offline installer is with the GOG account.
GOG has essentially created a way to bypass their own licenses, as a feature. And it looks like they won’t be affected by this law because of it.
Isn’t the law only about always online games?
That was my understanding as well.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a law, AB 2426, to address concerns over “disappearing” purchases of digital media, including games, movies, music, and ebooks.
Some of their games are drm-free/have offline installers
Can confirm for both Gog and steam I have always had access to the original fallout which went missing off store fronts for a number of years
licensing issues
I understand that the buyer doesn’t lose the de facto ability to install the game from a local copy of the installer, but is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end? I’m not saying it is, I’m just curious.
is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that no, you can’t. When you buy the game, you’ve obtained a perpetual license to install and play that game, similar to what you’d have if you bought the game on a disk. You can lose your ability to download the game, that isn’t guaranteed to be unlimited or perpetual, but installing it via the installer you downloaded, and playing it once you do, are forever. (This is in contrast to something like Steam, where you rely on their servers granting you permission to install the game, and that permission can be revoked.)
Right, if you download the offline installers, then they can’t stop you from doing whatever you’re going to do with it but you don’t own them. Legally, you can’t sell them, transfer them to someone else, etc.
There are other sections that make the lack of ownership by you clear and that you still have to abide by the publisher’s/developer’s licensing agreements but Section 10 states the situation outright:
Section 10 of the GOG user agreement says:
GOG content is owned by its developers/publishers and licensed by us.
Removed by mod
Galaxy is a necessary convenience for them to compete with Steam tbh
The existence of GOG and Steam is why gaming is bearable in 2024
For those willing to do a bit of CLI work there are even tools to pull your whole library automagically. Just make sure you got the space for it. Sitting at just over 1.5 TB here.
Yeah, I should have gone with GoG every chance I could. I guess it’s never to late to switch
Thor from Pirate Software must be absolutely seething rn
why?
He hates StopKillingGames, because he thinks it will make bad actors try to ruin devs because he expects people to try to profit from being able to provide game access to players when the devs are out of the picture. So therefore we can’t stop killing games, we need to just let games die and stop feeling entitled to the necessary code to run servers. And besides we need to get comfortable buying games with temporary licensing deals that are more convenient and cheap for the developers so they can not renew them if the game isn’t successful, and if the license runs out then we need to accept that the music or car or whatever legally needs to be removed. And we need to accept that if corporate wants to delete our accounts or sew our mouth to somebody’s ass then that’s just gonna have to happen because it’s what we agreed to. Turns out the man is a business bro shill cunt totally cool with the new bullshit because it’s preferred by the suits.
He was strawmaning the stop killing games initiative.
I need to get those Resident Evil remasters, the REMASTERS NOT The remaKES from dese guys.
Maybe it’s great, but I cant even download the installer on linux.
Um, yes, you can actually.
Installer file is a direct link to an executable file from their website. They contain the full game inside the installer. There’s no reason you can’t download that on Linux as long as you have internet and a browser.
GoG homepage > (your name [drop down menu] when logged in) > “Games” > Click on any game in your collection > Download offline backup game installers
You can download installers for whatever systems the game supports – usually that’s just a Windows .EXE installer (+ several .bin files if the game is large). For games intended to run on Linux w/o WINE, you can select “Linux” from a drop down where it says system and it will give you an .sh file.
If it’s an EXE and you just want extract it you can use https://github.com/dscharrer/innoextract
It supports the special GOG Inno files. And it’s a lot faster than the official installer with less temp files.
