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Just a quick reminder that discs that you burn yourself at home do degrade pretty quickly, much faster than pressed discs. I personally have had burned discs that failed after approx. 6 years. It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs. Even pressed discs can fail after 20 years if you are unlucky.
Using 2 big HDDs (2 for redundancy) full of your installers might be safer in the long run and also easier to manage and backup.
That's why I print out all my downloaded games
I hope you also laminate them for longevity.
I laminate my punch cards for longevity. Wouldn't want them breaking down.
You should really move to microfilm. It saves so much space!
It just doesn't smell the same
Use M-Disc media. It's said to last 1000 years. It's expensive and very slow to rip at the suggested 4x speed.
I've been very satisfied with them, and you just need a regular Blu-Ray drive.
And reminder that solid state drives (including thumb drives) can lose data after a couple years if they are not plugged in from time to time
This is the message we need to hear. The bread and butter. I get so tired of people nitpicking GOG and Mozilla over every relatively minor thing when they are some of the only people trying to hold back the deluge of bullshit.
Agreed. Someone complained Firefox moved to updates every few days or something.
They had no clue Firefox updates like all the time.
Mozilla is the best browser to ever exist and I will die on this hill.
The Nazi thing is nota nitpick though. They need to address that properly instead of the “sorry we got caught” response they gave.
GOG's founder did eventually give a better reply here (scroll to Mikee's comment): https://www.gog.com/forum/general/nazi_symbols_in_an_email_and_bs_excuse/page18
I'm not convinced GOG owes us any explanation beyond that. Even in the worst case where the accusers are right and it was an intentional dog-whistle, the marketing guy who did it probably gave his superiors the same explanation we got, in which case GOG management genuinely believes they already 100% told us what happened.
Also, the argument that GOG not sending the email to Germany proves they knew that it was bad ahead of time on an organizational level is common enough to be worth addressing here. It ignores how localization is often done, one person writing a template that then goes to others to localize and send out individually. I assume adding some review time between localization and send out is among the process changes they mentioned.
Is this about the Gog Newsletter thing? I’m not 100% informed, but didn’t they pretty much admit that they weren’t aware that ᛋ displayed as ϟ in some devices?
It’s not even a “sorry we got caught” thing, they had nothing to gain by sending a Nazi symbol in their newsletter. What more are they supposed to say?
GOG trying to drum up positive pr after that Nazi symbol newsletter.
Yeah, that was a major WTF moment
Love to see it from GOG. Now if only they had a Linux launcher akin to Steam Big Picture Mode.
They would be the dream imo
Check out Heroic Games Launcher. Launches games from Epic, Steam, and GOG. Runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
Pull out disc with a game from 10 years ago
Installs just fine and launches
"Connecting to online services..."
"Timeout: Retry? Quit?"
Huh?
It's exactly GOG's thing that games sold there can't have any DRM, so this scenario is out. (Also, no disk with GOG games ;))
Probably why you won't find things like Red Dead Redeption II (PC) in GOG, since Rockstar wants to force you to register in their systems to get your sweet, sweet private info. (Curiously, the pirated version has no such anti-consumer crap)
In my experience as a gamer for almost 4 decades, the most likely scenario with a really old game is that it simply won't install or run in the OS version or even hardware that you have now, though give it enough time and somebody out there will have created an emulator or adaptor layer for it (like DOSBox).
But yeah, any game from the Phone-home DRM generation which isn't bought from a seller which has No DRM policy (which only GOG has, as far as I know - even itch.io doesn't have a No DRM policy) will almost certainly have an artificially created end-of-life that has nothing to do with the OS or hardware you have being too new for the game.
I absolutely adore GOG for being like this, and for consistently applying pressure to publishers and other marketplace vendors alike.
I just also have A Steam Library with like 1200+ titles, and it's measured in Terabytes. And butrot in my physical media will be non zero, in long enough timescale.
I consider my continued patronage of buying games to be my subscription costs to the platform vendors. 🤣
I'm here wondering if this quote is going to age like milk or not.
Well, if you download an installer from gog and save it to a disk, it's yours forever, regardless of what gog does. Of course, the window to do so might close with very short notice.
If only they would post more stuff on Bluesky or even use Mastodon instead of TwitterX
(Yes, i am aware they have a bluesky profile but they post less stuff on there, it seems)
To preserve "pagan" games or are we talking about another GOG?
Yeah I'm still pretty concerned about that whole event but it seems like everyone has just forgotten about it.
I could have forgiven the initial email as a rogue nazi intern but their official response being "we made sure not to send it to Germans and its on you all for seeing nazi symbols as nazi symbols" is pretty fucking problematic. Also before anyone defends them as just being pagan symbols, the ones they chose to use were both modern creations by nazi germany
For anyone who's not up to date: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
I should get more things on gog.
Steam just makes things work on linux without issue so thats why we still get steam games.
You can add any gog game to steam and run it through whatever proton compatibility layer you would like. The Heroic launcher and Lutris both also allow this.
Sadly, based on market share, people seem to be picking Steam over GoG.
They almost always pick what’s most convenient/familiar over what’s principled and better in the long term.
Until gog finally gets a good first(!) party linux client buying games there is not really worth it yet.
Does GOG support Linux?
More like, Linux supports GOG and they don't try to stop it.
The thing you want is the Heroic Games Launcher, you can login to your GOG/Epic/Amazon and install/launch games (using WINE/Proton) pretty much like using Steam.
It's even available as a Flatpak so you can use it on the Steam Deck.
You don't need to back up games yourself. Piracy exists. If a storefront disappears, or otherwise you lose access to a game you licensed, you can always just fish it back from the high seas. Just only buy games without DRM or which's DRM has been cracked already.