• Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    If there’s an offline game you love and play all the time, consider buying it again on GOG.com.

      • TommySoda@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        But also with GOG you can download the installers and play offline. It’s literally one of their big selling points. It’s less convenient than things like steam, but you can do whatever the hell you want when you buy it. So in that regard, it literally is a purchase. Or as close as you can get with digital goods.

      • tehmics@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        But GoG provides it DRM free, so you can always play what you’ve downloaded til the end of time. It’s as good as piracy in that way.

        • lastweakness@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          At that point, why not buy the game on any platform of your choosing and just pirate it when it stops being accessible on the platform you bought it on? I understand wanting to support GOG, I “own” a lot of games on GOG as well. But it’s not really “owning” even on GOG if at some point, I could lose the ability to download the game.

          Any game that isn’t available as a pirated game isn’t going to be on GOG anyway… The problem here is that GOG needs to be better than piracy in any tangible way and right now, that’s not the case. It would be the case for me if GOG Galaxy was available on Linux but it’s not, as one example.

          • tehmics@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            It’s data.

            It’s never “owning” in the traditional sense, because data is not physical.

            When people say they own something, there’s an implication that it’s theirs until they decide to part with it. That is true for games bought without DRM. DRM free the closest you’ll ever get to ‘owning’ data, you possess that on your own local device and it can’t be taken away.

            You can lose the ability to download the game, sure. But that is an additional service, not the game itself. You have that data until you delete it. Same with GoG Galaxy. that’s an extra service.

            You’re arguing 2 or 3 different things. Ownership as a legal right, ownership as in possession, and a weird third thing where you seem to be confusing meta services with the ownership of the thing itself.

            • lastweakness@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              It just needs to be "owning* in the way physical media without DRM works. That is data too after all. The ability to sell your copy of the data or have your friend borrow.

              Yes, DRM-free is the closest thing, never argued otherwise. I’m also not arguing the services offered by GOG are part of “ownership”. The lack of an ability to download a game at any point is just a part of the fact that GOG too is simply licensing in the end. But yes, GOG is still the closest thing to “owning” games. Which is why it sucks that so many titles on GOG have DRM despite the claims btw…

              I’m really only arguing one thing: piracy is better than GOG right now in every single way. You don’t have to worry about hidden DRM. You don’t have to worry about account creation bullshit. You don’t have to worry about anything else. You just download, hit play and it works every single time. If I send the copy to a friend, it will still work.

              Piracy has always been closer to “owning” than GOG, so GOG should at least have some other tangible benefits over piracy. But right now, they don’t.

        • radix@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Legally, it’s still a license, it’s just effectively impossible to revoke.

          Edit to expand on this: A truly offline forever-purchase of physical goods can be re-sold. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine (this is the US-specific version, other jurisdictions may have similar doctrines).

          American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property.

          A digital “purchase” is usually non-transferable, even from GOG. It can’t be removed from your own HDD once you download the installer, but there are still restrictions attached on what you can do with it, even if those are limited and hard to enforce.

            • xapr@lemmy.sdf.org
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              5 days ago

              Technically, probably yes, but you can buy old, opened games on eBay. I doubt you can do the same with GOG games. Digital media is much harder if not impossible to resell.

        • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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          5 days ago

          If you back up the folder of a steam installed game that doesn’t need steam to run, what’s the difference?

          Owning the copy in a legal sense doesn’t affect most of the userbase tbh.

        • Voyajer@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          I mean at that point you can just make backups of your steam games too. A lot work straight from the exe and for the rest there are steam simulators.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            4 days ago

            A small minority of GOG games have DRM, a majority of Steam games have a form of DRM. “Use a simulator” isn’t a solution, I shouldn’t need a third party program to play the games I paid for.

            Also there’s a pretty big difference between downloading the installer and backing up the installed files, one is an intended backup solution, the other is a workaround.

            • yamanii@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              Which gog games have DRM? The costumers over there even protested Hitman’s inclusion in the store precisely because without internet you can’t unlock anything in the game, GOG even removed it from sale.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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        5 days ago

        Is there a nice FOSS utility to do that? I need to do a backup of my GOG library.

        • Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          I did find a few on GitHub, but the one I tried had an error after a few downloads, so I just manually got them all.

    • Konala Koala@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Problem there is the games I have in Steam which are Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana, and GTA 5 I was looking at and thinking about whether or not to get, are not coming up on GOG.