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Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase
(www.cgmagonline.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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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.
It just needs to be "owning* in the way physical media without DRM works. That is data too after all. The ability to sell your copy of the data or have your friend borrow.
Yes, DRM-free is the closest thing, never argued otherwise. I'm also not arguing the services offered by GOG are part of "ownership". The lack of an ability to download a game at any point is just a part of the fact that GOG too is simply licensing in the end. But yes, GOG is still the closest thing to "owning" games. Which is why it sucks that so many titles on GOG have DRM despite the claims btw...
I'm really only arguing one thing: piracy is better than GOG right now in every single way. You don't have to worry about hidden DRM. You don't have to worry about account creation bullshit. You don't have to worry about anything else. You just download, hit play and it works every single time. If I send the copy to a friend, it will still work.
Piracy has always been closer to "owning" than GOG, so GOG should at least have some other tangible benefits over piracy. But right now, they don't.