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Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog
Check 2.1, GOG is the same.
If I back up a DRM-free installer what's the difference?
Legally, it's still a license, it's just effectively impossible to revoke.
Edit to expand on this: A truly offline forever-purchase of physical goods can be re-sold. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine (this is the US-specific version, other jurisdictions may have similar doctrines).
A digital "purchase" is usually non-transferable, even from GOG. It can't be removed from your own HDD once you download the installer, but there are still restrictions attached on what you can do with it, even if those are limited and hard to enforce.
Just like any game ever sold on a CD.
Technically, probably yes, but you can buy old, opened games on eBay. I doubt you can do the same with GOG games. Digital media is much harder if not impossible to resell.
If you back up the folder of a steam installed game that doesn't need steam to run, what's the difference?
Owning the copy in a legal sense doesn't affect most of the userbase tbh.
unless you keep the offline installers.
I mean at that point you can just make backups of your steam games too. A lot work straight from the exe and for the rest there are steam simulators.
Well, gentlemen. I guess we got this all sorted out. Not a big deal, after all.
A small minority of GOG games have DRM, a majority of Steam games have a form of DRM. "Use a simulator" isn't a solution, I shouldn't need a third party program to play the games I paid for.
Also there's a pretty big difference between downloading the installer and backing up the installed files, one is an intended backup solution, the other is a workaround.
Which gog games have DRM? The costumers over there even protested Hitman's inclusion in the store precisely because without internet you can't unlock anything in the game, GOG even removed it from sale.