So you have this one game and it comes with a limited number of installations allowed (3-5 seem to be typical). You maybe installed it on a single computer, maybe a reinstall after an upgrade (so that is two) but then one day you want to play again after a break and IT WILL NOT LET YOU as you have reached your limit?!?!?! My guess is that pirates have, using a key generator, used YOUR key until it has reached its limit of allowed uses. Honest money paid for a game and it will not let you play? Not from a shady reseller but big shops like Steam, Origin, UPlay and GameStop.

DRM? No thank you!

....but..... updates arriving very late or never that have already been served to other customers on other platforms? No thank you to that as well but if I have to choose, better a game I can play, albeit perhaps buggy, than one up to date that I cannot play.

^ Incorrect. The agreement between publishers and digital stores is about an agreement to sale, not some retroactive destruction order against pre-existing owners after expiration. Here's how it actually works - If a publisher removes a game for sale due to a rights issue, the game stays in the accounts for those who've already bought it. It just disappears from the store pages as being available to purchase new copies. See many previous examples on GOG such as "Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures", "ARMA", "CryoStasis", etc. This is all part of the same contract that games publishers sign in the first place to get a game on GOG.

Nor can owners of legally owned retail discs be ordered to retroactively "destroy the discs" years later just because the games aren't available to purchase at a future date (eg, No One Lives Forever) or because an in-game soundtrack / branding license expired (eg, Ferrari in Outrun 2006). Nor can people be ordered to burn books the day they go out of print or smash up CD's when an artist / band sues their music producer 10 years later. The only stuff consumers are "required" to destroy are counterfeit / pirated / stolen items where the actual copy itself was obtained illegally (torrents, etc).

People who legally bought games that were later removed from GOG for sale for other people due to rights issues have a 100% legal copy they can continue to own, play and even re-download for life. Even Steam works the same way. The biggest advantage of GOG over Steam is insurance against being unable to re-download already purchased games in years to come for other reasons (eg, the store went out of business or the publishers replaced a desired "vanilla" game with an undesired flaky "remastered" one).

Those are the people who are able to function without needing to be constantly connected to the Internet. Not everyone is DRM-Free.

originally came here to get old games that actually worked, with the exception of a few games, most were able to play right away despite being very old. My copies on steam are still broken. After that I realized that with each purchase I actually 'owned' the game, no worries of having to sign in to some client, try to remember passwords, try to juggle lists of games on which client, worry about connectivity in order to play, there is no meta data aggregation/snooping (or wasnt until Galaxy, but you can play games without going thru galaxy) and you didnt have to worry about stores going bankrupt and taking their servers with them, or getting banned from clients for whatever reason and losing your supposedly purchased library.

in short: i buy a game, download it, its mine, its playable, lots of deep sales, a fun community, one site for my library, pretty big list of games to choose from, lots of old titles which i collect.


i dont do pvp or multi player so am unaffected for the most part by updates. I believe your post should be taken very seriously by GoG as its valid and concerning to a pretty big section of customers that im sure they would love to have

You realize that you're complaining about this on an internet social forum?

The Pace of Modern Life
https://xkcd.com/1227/

So? It's not like it has to be all or nothing. When I'm at home and with no one else around I'll post and reply here from time to time, but I don't even turn the internet on in my phone. I don't need, or even want to be online when I'm out, I certainly don't when I'm with other people.

Most games have patches for GOG rolling out the same day or the day afterwards. It's rare for patches to be later than 1 day. That's been my experience. If you have to wait weeks for the new patch then it's completely the fault of the developers not GOG itself.

All GOG does is test it and put it in an installer. Though I heard they are also testing patches being delivered at the same time as steam through galaxy (at your own risk). Another positive with GOG is that you can download bonus content seperately and Galaxy allows for rollbacks in case a patch breaks something or if you liked the game better before the patch.

Anyhow I had no problems with huge delays of patches myself. Though there have been cases where developers use Steam users as 'guinea pigs' to test a new patch out to check if the patch is actually stable.
Sometimes a developer thinks a patch is so small, they don't want to go through the hassle of constantly giving patches to GOG and combine it one bundle. So it's different for each developer. Not GOG's fault, more like the fault the way GOG is treated. Then again I suppose GOG could do some pushing towards (some) developers or let those devs be more clear about their plans on bringing their patches here.

I don't blame you. Stick to Steam.

I only buy here when it's games I really like and want backed up. Otherwise I just play everything on my Steam account now. I own a number of games on here that have not been updated and probably never will at this point.

Yeah games lagging behind in patches on gog compared to steam is something that's been known for a while. they are working on this. the split community thing has been a fairly big problem and they've shown they're pretty focused on addressing this.

one thing I don't like about your post though is that you pretty much equate steam to origin.

origin is not steam. EA is not Valve. Valve supposedly has this massive monopoly, that the pundits constantly remind people of. yet everything is ok for people like gog and origin.

origin is fine as long as Steam is around, and also as long as it's number one. keep that in mind next time you speak of Steam and Origin in the same sentence. they aren't the same thing.

Don't you love how, for every conceivable situation, there's always a relevant xkcd?

It is licensing laws, and not part of the EULA. When you buy a game on gOg (or any other store) you buy two thing 1) a license to play the game and 2) the rights to use that service (gOg in this case) to manage the game. gOg's EULA actually only covers 2) not 1), which is part of the individual games license agreement.

When it comes to gOg's "you buy it, you won ir", it's what people in the know calls "marketing"..... which is not worth the (digital) paper it is written on
You are confusing two different things here. No longer allowed to sell a game is not the same as revoking a license. The first part only applies go the store (I.e. they can no longer sell a game), the later to a user (i.e.. they are no longer allowed to use that license) The status of the store has no bearing on the status of the user.

yes but there is a clear distinction between gog and steam. you must recognize this. many Steam games will not launch without the client. and if the client decides to Do Something you are at its mercy.

with gog, once you've got the game, that's it.