Soon, GOG and all other storefronts will state that you’re purchasing a temporary digital license for any game who’s publisher uses an EULA that states you don’t own the game. This is due to the recently signed California law that forces storefronts to be transparent about the publishers EULA.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426
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.
Depends on the game, they still sell DRM games which are limited in being able to be downloaded freely
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.
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.
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.
On a legal level, it is how GOG works. They still only sell licenses. You just have the loophole that their installers and the games installed by them will work regardless.
While that may be partly true, (also likely) depending on the county you’re located, they’re not able to revoke the license though.
So in this specific case you having the files makes a world of difference.
