What you need to know
- GOG has used recent events to remind gamers of its secret weapon.
- When you buy a game on GOG, you get an offline installer for it, which cannot be taken away even if a license expires.
- It comes in response to Steam beginning to tell its customers they’re only buying a digital license, which in turn comes after California passed a law saying it has to.
Late last week, Valve started adding a note into the cart on its Steam game store so that anyone buying knew they weren’t actually getting ownership of the product. This, in turn, came after the State of California passed a law saying that digital stores would need to be up front about this.
In response, competitor store, GOG, has taken the opportunity to remind its customers that things are a little different over there.
Since checkout banners are trending, we’re thinking of putting one up ourselves. Thoughts on this one? pic.twitter.com/d3y66PrL7QOctober 11, 2024
GOG’s big selling point that more people should shout about is that it sells games DRM-free. When you buy a game on GOG, you get access to an offline installer for it, which you can use to install and play your games even in the event a license for it ends. It essentially uncouples the license from the game and lets you have some actual ownership of the things you buy.
Of course, to use the installers indefinitely you will still want to have a copy or three backed up somewhere, and those aren’t necessarily small. Storage, be it local and cloud, isn’t that expensive these days though, but the point is that it’s an option.
Does it have as many games as Steam? No. But it’s currently the only platform that seems to give a damn about game preservation in the digital era, so it deserves our support. Buying Baldurs Gate 3? It’s on there, and with an offline installer, you can be sure it won’t go away.
All of this talk of licenses and ownership recently reared its ugly head again courtesy of Ubisoft and Sony. The former shut down The Crew without any offline access, meaning that the game is officially dead for all eternity. The latter announced, then rolled back, that it would be removing digital video content from folks libraries.
In any case, Steam, Epic Games, and the like, don’t currently give you what GOG does. I want to see more publishers putting more games into GOG, and I want more people (myself included) to use it more often. It’s about the only place that sells games right now that seems to get it.
