To the OP:
Physical copies are awesome.

Not this DD rubbish.

I still own 300~400 physical videogames.
Building a place to oroperly store them.

I don't understand your concern, or see any problem with that.

GOG's a great source but not the only one.

After reading the source code for Homeworld Cataclysm was lost, and thus not expecting a GOG release.
I went, and bought the only hard copy game I've ever bought, since I switched to PC from PS2 in 2005.
Now a GOG release has appeared, against all odds, so what?

I had around 150 Steam games, when I discovered GOG, on Dec 13 2013. 8 on Origin, and 7 on Uplay
Now I only have 82 games on Steam, and 287 on GOG.

I vowed once I'd stop buying non GOG games, and failed, but it's a rare event, and a game that may never release on GOG.
When a game I own on Steam (that I didn't hate) appears on GOG, I get the GOG version.
Often the day it's released, but otherwise when on sale.

I then destroy the steam game (Remove from Account), and use the offline installer to get my GOG version.
I hate all store clients (including Galaxy), but at least GOG gives me a choice.
I only use offline installers, and that's my main reason for buying from GOG, DRM free is great as well, it's just not the main reason.

You want a game, and don't want to wait to see if GOG gets it, buy it, whereever you prefer, if there's any choice.
If GOG does release it, and you liked the game, you can support the devs and GOG, by getting it here as well.
No rules exist, except the ones you set yourself, and those rules can always be changed.

I don't have a concern per se, I'm just curios to see what other people think about buying physical copies of games. It's not something I've really contemplated until recently.

Hmmm... well, offline installers with DRM are pretty much pointless if you ask me.

Well, yeah, if it's a recently released game, but I don't buy a lot of those to be honest... and for older games the money will get to anyone but the devs, I assure you.

Now there's a thought you can keep to throughout life in general... as long as you follow the law and don't shoot any sheriffs.

If you have room to store them that is...

«Sheriff John Brown always hated me, for what, I don't know.»

Love Marley, love Clapton, but I always hated that song. :P

Just browsing ebay for no game in particular, I can tell you in the past 9 years or so since GOG has come about, box copies are generally WAY cheaper than they used to be, here in the US.

I get physical copies occasionally, like for example Diablo 1, even though last I checked it doesn't work with Windows 10 (Grr) and the expansions for Dungeon Siege 1 and 2, the expansion for 2 is broken in Win 10 since the Creator's Update. Noticing a trend here? MS Fixes compatibility for some games in an update, and breaks it for others.

Slightly off topic: If you're using Win 7 or earlier and not interested in DX 12, there's not a lot of reason to upgrade to 10 yet. The one thing it DOES do well though, is when something goes wrong, it is generally really good at fixing itself.

EDIT: Just reinstalled Diablo 1 for sh*ts and giggles, and installed the patch for it from blizzard. Apparently MS fixed the compatibility issues with it. Diablo 1 now works with Windows 10 with 1 patch!

Not sure about DS 2's Broken World expansion though. All good, I still have DS1 to play through :)

A good piece of advice I also backed in the early days of Win 10, especially during the "free upgrade" window. I am using Win7 and I plan to keep using it as long as possible, mostly because I frequently play older games... and on Win 10 you never really know what will work and what won't, if it works how long it will keep working etc.

I have to say, I was like that as well, really didn't want to move to win 10, however I can tell you after quite some time with it on a new machine, I have not had any issues with it. Surprisingly I haven't fired up the win 7 machine since getting the win 10 machine, everything has run fine, although sometimes an nocd is needed where securom is used as win10 doesn't support it (which is a bonus!). So long as you turn off all the options and remove the bloat ware normally associated with windows (IE for instance) then I can recommend moving to win 10.

I love Win 10, it just seems like more older games work with 7. Speaking of, DS 2 Broken World is still broken (har har) in the creator's update for Win 10, but I'm super pleased Diablo 1 works natively now.

Got the Dune 2000 CD first... turns out it has a 16-bit installer (duh, should have known that would be the case), so I can't get it running on my 64bit Win7, but I'll give it a shot in Wine, then copy it across to Windows once it's installed.

If that doesn't work either I'll just use openRA and source the videos/music & other assets from the CD.

So, finally got my copy of Kohan 2: Kings Of War... turns out the CD is protected wtih SecuROM, which means not even a bit by bit copy of the disk + disk emulation software will work to get the game running disk-free. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

It also means I'll be able to play the game only as long as the disc is readable, which of course, might not be forever. That's DRM for you folks.

Oh and before anyone asks, there are no no-cd patches available for the latest patched version of the game, so that option is not even on the table.

All things considered, I'll most likely not buy the rest of the Kohan series as physical copies. My idea was to play these on a rig that doesn't even have a CD drive, so obviously things didn't work out as expected.

I Broke an original C&C Red Alert disc :(. I can play the community remake, but they 're-balanced' the game making it not feel at all like the original and in my honest opinion making it quite crap.
I'm just glad I've got my supreme commander with forged alliance still even if spamming units like your throwing money at a problem to make it go away isn't my idea of strategy.
Seems Dawn Of War with all expansions held up well too.
The problem with Win10 as I see it though isn't one of compatibility, it's the fact the direction they want to move in is to have everything submitted through the windows store, like an apple app; that will ultimately screw everyone over in the end.
I can tell you personally from my experiences with it; linux is not ready to take the helm; it's not mainstream enough and is going backwards in some ways (UBUNTU fixed desktop style) that people aren't going to have the ability to simply jump ship.
I'm no simp I can get games working through the equivalent of a windows shortcut; it's simply that the support is not there.
Only certain games can be easily run & certainly not the majority needed to make it viable for gamers.

I second this. Any references will be useful here. I may have to do the same eventually for my new gaming rig... for the moment I'm trying to see how much I can manage with Linux & Wine, but at least some things are not looking very promising.

I know and I agree, though in the Wine department things have started to pick up pace recently - to the point where most DirectX 10 & 11 games can now run in Wine (and I'll remind you here that DirectX 9 support has been added fairly recently as well), though most of them not without some form of issues.

As many have mentioned before, getting Linux to be recognized as a gaming-capable OS is a chicken and egg problem: not many people are using Linux now because gaming is not that well supported on it, but retailers and companies are not supporting it because they are saying not many people are using it, so it's not really worth the trouble/investment. Somebody has to take the risk and a first step here... if you ask me it won't be the parties that are looking for immediate financial gains.

Its quite a few different things, and some are personal taste and such like so no given list. To start with go through the settings very carefully, most things you can do that way. I then jump into the apps and drop IE for instance, this is on off as things come back again sometimes. There are also some apps out there that remove some tracking software and things you can't normally remove (such as OneDrive). You can do a google for remove windows 10 tracking.