Comment by 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net on GOG: When we said we let you ‘own’ your games, we meant that no matter what happens you’ll still be able to play them thanks to our offline installers.

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.

I was looking for one of my favorite games from 1993. Not only is the developers website still up and you can still download the demo version and soundtrack from them, but I found some random guy rewrote the whole game in Javascript with WebGL and it can be played in a browser.

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?

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.

Surprisingly easy a lot of the time, mostly because nobody seems all that enthusiastic about enforcing the copyright.

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.

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!

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