Comment by AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world on Blizzard is delisting the OG Warcrafts from GOG, but GOG says it's gonna preserve them forever anyway, hands out a discount, and announces new policy for its preservation program to boot

If GoG goes down tomorrow

Or if Blizzard sues them to get the games removed.

The game will be removed on 13. December?

However that can’t simply take away a game someone has already bought.

Sure they can. Companies do it all the time.

Short of suing me for it (after finding out who I am and making sure I own the games), how would they do that for non-DRM games whose installer lives on my hard drive and that I can install whenever I want, wherever I want?

Is the “everything is a rental and you use it on sufferance until we say so” bullshit so ingrained now that people are no longer able to conceive of other ways for things to work?

I’m specifically talking about it being hosted on GoG. I thought I made that clear.

Games are constantly pulled from the Steam store, but that doesn’t result in owners losing access to the game, GOG is no different. The only thing that will happen is they stop selling the game, it’s standard practice.

GOG also offer offline installers that would be impossible for even GOG to take away from you.

There are differences with buisness models. Steam sells a license to use a software. This license can be revoked. GOG sells you a copy that you can download and run any time later without needing it. They can’t take that away from you.

Since the installers are DRM free, they physically cannot. Save for breaking into your home and destroying your hard drives.

I’m talking about the content on the store. If you don’t download it, then they can remove it and it’ll be gone, regardless of if you purchased it already. That said, they can still do some shady shit with content you physically have too. Sony once put a root kit on their CDs that would brick people’s computers if they tried to rip them to the hard drive.

If you don’t download it, then they can remove it and it’ll be gone, regardless of if you purchased it already.

Yes, if you don’t take possession of the goods you paid for, you are in fact not in possession of the goods you paid for.

Sony once put a root kit on their CDs

Ok. In theory they could have put in a kill switch. I’m choosing to trust they didn’t.

It will be removed from sale on 13 of December, but everyone who already bought it will continue to be able to download it from GOG indefinitely. Furthermore, GOG has stated their commitment to ensure the game remains compatible with newer computer and operating systems. That’s what the preservation project mentioned in the post is about.

I think you might have replied to the wrong person

I don’t think so. On my screen I see that post I responded to said this:

The game will be removed on 13. December?

So in my post I tried to explain that the games will still be available to download from GOG, but it will no longer be purchasable. Different people mean different things when they say “removed from GOG”, so I thought this was good to clarify.

It wasn’t really a question in that sense. What I meant by that sentence is that the game is already planned to be removed (from sale), so Blizzard suing GOG wouldn’t make much sense. However that doesn’t mean that GOG/Blizzard can just take the game away from those who already purchased it.

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Blizzard is delisting the OG Warcrafts from GOG, but GOG says it's gonna preserve them forever anyway, hands out a discount, and announces new policy for its preservation program to boot(www.pcgamer.com)

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