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.
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.
Yeah, like when you buy a physical copy of a gane, it’s up to you to make sure you keep that copy somewhere you can find it again, assuming it hasn’t started decomposing.
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.
Thanks for saying this.
With recent campaigns and rants against digital media, people often claim that “you own the game if you buy a physical copy”. That always makes me sigh, because it’s false.
Not saying there are some advantages for some use cases, but I dislike hyperbole and untruths.
That’s just semantics.
When you buy a CD, you don’t own the songs.
But you do have some item that belongs to you.
With Steam, you have a ticket that will let you into Steam to download the game for as long as your account is in good standing and as long as Steam exists.
With GOG, you have a file you can use to install the game on any machine INDEFINITELY. GOG can’t revoke your access for any reason, and if GOG shuts down, you can still install the games.
I have plenty drm free games in steam where I copied the game folder into other computers and it ran offline. At that point, there’s no difference between an installer and a compressed copy of that game. For reference, Grim dawn but there’s plenty more.
“Installing” is just semantics for decompressing a file in specific folders, you can the collect that data and “install” the game wherever. As long as you can run the game without steam, it doesn’t matter that you used steam to buy it.
You’re right! Some games on Steam are DRM-free.
All games on GOG are DRM-free as a rule.
The difference with physical is that you own the physical medium the license is stored on and are permitted to sell the physical medium with the license. With digital downloads you are not allowed to sell a drive with the files. Since you are technically making a copy.
The worth of a gog game secondhand is 0 though. Theres nothing to be made there.
People do sell accounts though.
Isn’t there a clause in baldur’s gate 3 terms that lets you transfer the game license once to a friend or something along those lines?
Not sure how that works but it’d be cool if we can have that apply for all of them (digitally) maybe like 3 times over the lifetime of the licensed game.
Only thing I could find was section 5 which relates to eldritch law. Worth a read!
You can transfer the game with a wish scroll.
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’.
This article seems to say that it covers only digital items that have an always online requirement.
https://www.gamefile.news/p/california-ab2426-crew-call-of-duty
So i think offline games don’t need the warning, but online games, steaming movies, etc do need the warning.
Edit:
I looked a bit further and found the bill text:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2426#99INT
(4) This section does not apply to any of the following:
[…]
© Any digital good that is advertised or offered to a person that the seller cannot revoke access to after the transaction, which includes making the digital good available at the time of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet.
This exception clearly allows for user downloadable installer for a game with offline functionality. But consoles, steam, etc where you don’t get a standalone installer, they look like they will need the warning on all titles.
Technically that also applies to Steam, since you get a digital good available at the moment of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage, just copy the game folder and you’re done. It would be the equivalent of a music store place downloading mp3s (and the equivalent to GoG would be selling an .iso to the music CD you can burn whenever you want or an installer that extracts the mp3 to a folder).
If the game itself has DRM then that would also apply to GoG (yes, there are games with DRM on GoG, there’s just proportionally less of them).
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?
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
trying not to cry
cry a lot
give those people some cookies !
bursts in tears
The existence of GOG and Steam is why gaming is bearable in 2024
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Galaxy is a necessary convenience for them to compete with Steam tbh
well they should make it at least slightly usable. people harp on epic launcher when this piece of shit barely functions 20% of the time. if you have a big library, it’s useless.
or it was, I stopped trying to make it with when i realized playnite exists.
I have a large GOG library, I no longer use their launcher because I’m on Linux and use heroic. However their launcher always worked fine for me.
I don’t recall ever having an issue. Are you sure there wasn’t something underlying going on with your system?
yes. I’m talking about library including integration, which is the only reason I wanted to use galaxy to begin with. it fucks up all the time, losing games, not updating, logging out … not to mention its generally slow and clunky. playnite doesn’t look as nice but it’s 100x better in every other way.
Strange, I guess to be fair I haven’t used their launcher in at least a year or two. Good that you found a solution that works better for you though.
Eh, it’s literally there for games that need online access.
I use it for theme hospital and that’s it. Everything else i standalone
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They don’t really though. I haven’t been on GoG in a minute, but when I was looking for an offline installer (I think for Cyberpunk?), it was very easy to find it
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I had a situation with The Saboteur.
When installed manually with downloaded installers it had configuration issues, IIRC it was limited to 1280x720 and the in game option to modify it didn’t work.
But when installed with Galaxy it defaulted to 1920x1080 and the in game options worked.
At that point my game was working and I didn’t investigate further so I don’t know if it was downloading different installers, or performing post install tweaks to my game config, but from a functional perspective the game was broken when not using Galaxy. Ideally whatever the “magic” was it should be included in the standalone installers!
Sounds like the work of saboteurs.
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Yeah they manage both distribution methods.
I’m just highlighting at least one example where they have regrettably left the standalone as a 2nd class option.
Did people think they meant something else? Or was it more that they didn’t really elaborate and folks didn’t know quite what they meant?
I think they are clarifying due to what has happened with Ubisoft. They’re also using it as an opportunity to spread the word farther that they won’t do the same thing.
It’s too clarify that in their case the games you buy on their platform don’t require anything in particular to install (just the install file that you can download from their website directly and back up for later use), contrary to all other major stores.
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 was strawmaning the stop killing games initiative.
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.
I need to get those Resident Evil remasters, the REMASTERS NOT The remaKES from dese guys.
