Games

This has literally always been the case with Steam, the only difference is that people are told up front now. Things will likely continue to operate exactly the same as it has until now, I doubt Valve wants to disrupt the giant money train they have.

I like GOG, but this is just weasel-words to take advantage of the ignorance of the public. Whether you receive the installs directly or not, you still don't own your games, you are just licensing them, same as Steam.

This doesn't tip the scales into the "this is wrong" territory for me, but I do think this kind of word manipulation exploiting an unknowledgeable public is a little bit slimy.

edit: I had a bit of knee-jerk reaction to the sensationalism of the headline; what GOG actually says is fine and doesn't imply anything beyond licensing in my eyes.

All online storefronts doing business in California will soon be forbidden by law to lie to customers with words like "buy" when they really mean "license". GOG is no exception.

https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240ab2426

I like GOG and I like steam too. While it is true that GOG can't take the offline installer from me, this does not make it true I can play the game forever since many games are dynamically linked to libraries that may not be available in the future. This happened to me with games I just had bought. Steam also dynamically links to libraries but what I like about the way they are doing it is that these are part of the base installation so as long as you keep these files, the games should keep working. Nothing being perfect, I think they both try to do things in their own way and try to convince us that it is the best one.

I'll stick with my Steam cloud saves and game notes and community forums and community guides and custom controller configurations and community controller configurations and overlay and workshop and screenshots and steam deck and steam link and ...

Also, the very first game I ever bought on Steam was almost 15 years ago, and it was delisted and has not been available on Steam for over 10 years. Yet I can still re-download and play it right now.

Steam is not the evil corporation people pretend it is. Take your rage to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

Doesn't steam have a clause to the effect of "if we go out of business, you'll get X period to download your games so you can manage them yourself"?

Chad GOG

2.1 We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a 'license') to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog

GOG has the same drawbacks as Steam without any of the useful features. They should cut down on their "owning games" lies and spend time improving their platform instead.