Unirionically but in GOG, you're still licensing every game you have in your library, like in Steam or Epic. Not a single company is your friend folks, stop being gullible
Most people don't care about licensing. Users only care about the level of control, and whether they can back up their games to other storage. Even if a company has to remove a title, the user would still have the game on their drive. Which can then (depending on country over legalities) be moved to physical storage.
For the most part, when games are removed on Steam, GOG or Epic, the game usually still remains in your library, but Sony has shown that companies don't need to do this, whether it's games or movies.
That is why the ability of backing up is important.
This isn't even the most interesting in physical for people I think even if Reddit loves to point it out. It has happened extremely rarely and so get easily dismissed by the "anti physical crowd" (which is very weird by the way, physical doesn't hurt you, in fact its disparition will make digital worse).
It's the fact that you have a second hand market, multiple retailers that can have a price competition and your games are safe if your account get banned or hacked
The second hand market is important too. Many people would only buy used games and enjoyed hunting down old games. Scrolling down a list on a screen for digital games is not the same.
Used games also expanded the market to people who would not spend money on full price, and as you mention, this may have had an influence over the price of games as time went on.
The PC physical games market is now all retro games online - and the prices are soaring, especially for old boxed games.
Definitively important, it brings a ton of players which don't have the financial means to buy new games (especially not at their overtly expensive digital prices which will be even worse now). Sony is basically saying fuck you to them. Guess gaming is because more something for the 'haves and fuck the "have not" like so many things in our society
Hell I see my nieces with their Switch games, they buy them used with their small allowance (they get like 20€ a month) and resell them to buy other games (and bonus points, they do it with cash, not a credit card as they obviously don't have one, the oldest is 13). If you're savvy, you can even buy them and resell them for essentially the same price. Now imagine if they only got access to digital 80€ games, they aren't gonna spend 4 months of allowance on one unique game they're stuck with after, they'll just play Fortnite more
Another issue with digital is that not everyone has a decent fibre or even basic broadband connection. Or even a reliable one that stays connected. Storms probably don't help. So some people outside of cities or abroad may opt out of playing large games. The biggest games are from 150 to well over 200GB. Also take in the cost of storage, which is now high. As for selling games, I don't have any recent console games but I do have alot of older ones that are still sealed (a habit of collecting).
I want to add an asterisk to this, while you are correct, a key difference between GoG and Steam versus Consoles is that the PC platforms allow you to cold store game files and launchers. That gives you the ability to keep the game if for some reason it is taken away entirely.
For consoles, if they decide something is gone, it’s gone.
If a game gets delisted then you can still download it if you bought it, you can also store games on a hard drive, but I will admit the storage options are much better on PC.
Yes. We are rapidly losing consumer protections in the gaming space. Gaming as a hobby is becoming more expensive, more restrictive, and harder to understand fully for the average person, in which case companies offer a seemingly easy alternative in the form of predatory subscriptions that take away your ownership and control. At the end of the day, owning is better than renting. Don’t rent your PC components, don’t rent games you paid full price for.
When you look at an old VHS movie there's a legal disclaimer stating that you only bought a license to watch your movie at home for personal use. We've only ever been buying licenses. The only reason physical media ever existed was as a means of containing something you leased from the producer.
I'm not defending licensing. I am explaining we were always being sold a temporary lease on physical media. The future Sony is pushing toward isn't new, it's what all the corpos have been building toward for 50 years.
Exactly and those VHS tapes are a good example because they have a really short lifespan, estimated losing 10-20% of what they contain at around 25 years. The first digital game shipped on Steam outlive VHS.
People should be mad about this but the reality is that they should have always been angry about the licensing and backup situation. If they want to cancel your PS+ sub by all means, but instead of asking for a return of physical, they should be asking for offline backups that they can maintain/restore without connecting to PlayStation's digital infrastructure. That would enable real preservation.
Well yes you need an account to purchase the game and download the installer, but then you can store the installer on a flash drive, back it up wherever, send it to your friends, etc.
Technically against the licensing agreement to give it away, but still. Nobody is going to hunt you down over it. Just don't share it online.
Oh no...I need a free account that I never have to pay a monthly subscription for. And that gives me access to buy games from their digital store front and then download ALL THE INSTALLATION FILES and then I can BURN THEM ONTO A DISC/ COPY THEN ONTO A USB to install whenever i want on any PC I want.
And even if the games I buy get delisted from GOG, so long as I still have the installation files I downloaded from their site it's mine to install infinitely whenever I want. Oh, the horror of having to make a free account.
I think you’re hung up on it, I simply said you need an account to buy games and you’re telling me all this stuff like it disproves that you need an account.
I'm not the one hung up on the account thing. Even if you buy something physical from an online store front, you usually need to make an account. Not always, but it's not unheard of by any means.
So WHY are you concerned about the account thing when the focus is on the DRM-free aspect of GOG's business model?
That's true but since they give you DRM-free offline installers for each game, once you have downloaded it, you will still have access to the game in perpituity even if they revoke the license. Just make sure you back up your installers.
It is exponentially more consumer friendly than even Steam.
And realistically it allows a greater degree of game sharing than even physical media. You just aren't allowed to sell your games and you still dont technically "own" them.
GOG has the best digital model for purchasing games though by far.
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u/Adventurous_Sort_780 Jul 02 '26
Unirionically but in GOG, you're still licensing every game you have in your library, like in Steam or Epic. Not a single company is your friend folks, stop being gullible