For “rare” games like some of my oldies from the 80s and 90s (one or two that weren’t even on the abandonware sites last I checked) I have ISOs I ripped and store on my NAS. Same with stuff bought form smaller/sketchier stores (I am sure it is backed up millions of times over, but think Romero’s Sigil).
For gog or steam or whatever games? I just don’t bother. The French Monk Incident more or less taught me there is zero chance of maintaining archives of GoG games. Their servers are “fine” at the best of times (let alone when the site is “dead”) and they don’t publicize when an installer is updated or not.
So if gog or steam or whatever goes offline and I still really want to play… Darklands? Piracy.
Way back at the start of GoG (I want to say year one), CDP did the “joke” of suddenly taking down the entire site except for a text page saying they are shutting down. I forget if they said that people would have 24 hours to back up their games or if they said we were up shit creek, it doesn’t matter.
They then basically said “Ha ha, april fools! But you see, that is why you should buy all your games from us because we are DRM free and you own them”. Which… rightfully angered a LOT of people.
So GoG did a video where a “french monk” (which is really weird since they are Polish but…) apologized and gave away a discount code or something. And in The Witcher 2, an NPC was added who alluded to all this and I think gave away a free copy of The Witcher 1 if you beat him at dice poker or whatever?
Short term? It led to a lot of us actually trying to back up our games. And realizing that was not feasible because GoG would almost never post changelogs or let us know which installers had updated versions and ain’t nobody got time to manually scrape every download page. Long term? You can generally tell who was a “GoG OG” in that we look at ANY “And we are the best site ever because we have no DRM and preserve everything” bit of PR from GoG/CDP because it is painfully obvious this is just advertisement for them.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you’re submitting before posting to see if it’s already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don’t share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don’t want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
For “rare” games like some of my oldies from the 80s and 90s (one or two that weren’t even on the abandonware sites last I checked) I have ISOs I ripped and store on my NAS. Same with stuff bought form smaller/sketchier stores (I am sure it is backed up millions of times over, but think Romero’s Sigil).
For gog or steam or whatever games? I just don’t bother. The French Monk Incident more or less taught me there is zero chance of maintaining archives of GoG games. Their servers are “fine” at the best of times (let alone when the site is “dead”) and they don’t publicize when an installer is updated or not.
So if gog or steam or whatever goes offline and I still really want to play… Darklands? Piracy.
French monk incident ?
Way back at the start of GoG (I want to say year one), CDP did the “joke” of suddenly taking down the entire site except for a text page saying they are shutting down. I forget if they said that people would have 24 hours to back up their games or if they said we were up shit creek, it doesn’t matter.
They then basically said “Ha ha, april fools! But you see, that is why you should buy all your games from us because we are DRM free and you own them”. Which… rightfully angered a LOT of people.
So GoG did a video where a “french monk” (which is really weird since they are Polish but…) apologized and gave away a discount code or something. And in The Witcher 2, an NPC was added who alluded to all this and I think gave away a free copy of The Witcher 1 if you beat him at dice poker or whatever?
Short term? It led to a lot of us actually trying to back up our games. And realizing that was not feasible because GoG would almost never post changelogs or let us know which installers had updated versions and ain’t nobody got time to manually scrape every download page. Long term? You can generally tell who was a “GoG OG” in that we look at ANY “And we are the best site ever because we have no DRM and preserve everything” bit of PR from GoG/CDP because it is painfully obvious this is just advertisement for them.
Interesting, thanks for taking the time to provide that extra bit of context as my searches for “French monk incident” were way off 😅🤣.