There are two assumptions about this that can go wrong:

1. Assuming that Steam's current course of giving all its users perpetual non-revocable access to their games (and make no mistake, it is their prerogative to do so, they have arranged things in such a way that it is not an obligation) is the most profitable path forward, now and always. It may be, but I'm not convinced.

At some point, if Steam decide to go for a Netflix-like experience for example, it may decide during the course of this transition to just thrash everyone's collection.

Oreilly did precisely this with books. The main difference is that Oreilly was drm-free prior to that so its users had a prior opportunity to backup their collection.

2. If assumption #1 holds (which is a big if), assuming that everyone who is at the helm of Steam (now and forever including companies that acquire it) correctly recognises that reality and forever go with it. There is quite a sizeable collection of past ceos getting this wrong (especially when a potential change of course veers on the horizon) and not making the right call. Its not a trivial decision to make and hindsight is always 20/20.

Why are you here then? What's the appeal of GOG for you, if DRM-free doesn't offer you more ownership of your games?

no it doesn't it is just more convenient

Is that because you do not wish to own the games you've purchased, and just see them as a throwaway commodity ?.

Because there is no seller which gives you proper ownership like you can modify as much as you want as long as you want or download it from anywhere not only from the seller site , and you could use dlcs from any store not just where you bought the main game

Modify as much as you want = GOG does this since its DRM-free unlike Steam which has limits
Download from anywhere = GOG offers offline installers. As close to "anywhere" as you can get. Wouldnt make sense to be able to buy from GOG and download from steam or vice-versa
Use DLC from any store = never experimented with this but not sure why you wouldnt want to purchase from the same store you bought the game from

download from anywhere != you can dl from gog, i dont mean steam has to offer downloads for gog , but you could dl your games from 3rd parties or torrent legally
example when some games missing dlcs here so you could just buy em on steam and still use with your game
or you could get it cheaper , it is like toners for printers , forcing you to only be able to buy from the printer manufacturer is anti consumer

I share Orkhepaj's view that when it comes to ownership and preservation, the gaming industry is sorely lacking in vision. Even "supposed" defenders of those values offer only a partial solution to the problem at best.

It is quite limited. To modify your games, you need to uncompile them and modify the code, quite possibly illegally depending on where you live.

To really modify your games easily, you'd need for the source code to be available with legal permission to modify it.

Then, you could even distribute your modifications (not by distributing the whole source code which would still be proprietary, but by distributing your diffs).

However, the gaming industry simply isn't geared for this right now.

There might be a possibility once games reach the public domain, except that:
- Source code for games is not well preserved and often lost (plus even if it isn't lost, game companies have no legal requirement whatsoever to distribute it once copyright expires)
- Copyrights length is so prohibitively long that the earliest games to reach public domain will be in the public domain late this century (probably after you and I are dead)
- Increasingly, they are arranging for important parts of the game to not even be distributed client-side. A lot of the plumbing for the networking for games that have online-only multiplayer for example would have to be reimplemented from scratch

Though it would make sense to easily distribute your drm-free collection (outside the store where you purchased it) to some other third-party that can legally hold it for you and make it available for you to download (probably against some fee), we don't currently have the legal framework for a third-party to implement all that functionality as a service (ie, if some company offered to upload your GOG games from your account and store them for you separately from GOG, they'd get sued and probably lose).

And we don't currently have the tooling to easily leverage generic cloud storage solutions (ie, aws glacier) to hold backups of our games for us and stores (ex: GOG) don't have much incentive to provide us with said tooling.

So like modify to the point where you can create your own game with the assets from the game you are modding? So its less you are buying the game but more buying lego blocks that are already pre-assembled in a specific format that you can then reassemble and add your own existing blocks to create a new "game"?

Would the closest solution be to upload the offline installers for a game you own to a cloud service for your access only which you can then download to reinstall the game (to avoid piracy)? It is extra steps and not as smooth but in the current environment, it may not be a terrible alternative.

I agree that more ownership is nice and I would prefer having games on USB/CD that can be reinstalled but this is the state of the industry right now. DRM-free isnt perfect but its the best in an increasingly fragile world.

Also a separate thought but since games are getting many updates over time, where are these updates stored? If the servers storing the updates were needed to "fix" a game (currently thinking of the Day 1 patches many PS4/Xbox games get now to make games remotely playable on release) eventually die out, does this mean that players are left with the "broken" version 1.0 of the game after several years have passed? Games really are more "fragile" that ever if that is the case and its an even bigger issue then that the industry is moving toward just shipping out broken games with the intent to patch later.

All sorts of reasons that have little to do with the core content of the game:
- Fixing bugs the developer is unwilling to
- Making multiplayer work offline
- Make the game work in Linux/MacOS and if the dev doesn't update the game in the future, future versions of Windows

Minor adjustments to annoying game quirks might also be possible (ex: make the dialog move faster/slower, auto-save more often, remap the control keys, etc).

But sure, the long term goal once the game hits the public domain is to allow would-be fan visionaries to improve the game in ways the original author didn't think of and sell the new and improved version to an eager public.

Heck, even before the game hits public domain, you could see emerging partnerships between people improving the game and original creator where the improved version is sold and the creator gets a cut of the profits.

Yes, it is totally possible when you are a tech geek like me. However, it is a lot of work and not really accessible to the masses. Especially when the store doesn't make it easy to plugin custom tooling into what they got (looking at you GOG).

I don't want to be cluttered with yet more CDs and USBs drives. I want better management of digital assets with ownership in mind.

Some games go DLC/update galore for years and years, but I think the vast majority of games have a limited window around release time (1-2 years after release tops) where they get patched up and afterwards they are in a pretty stable state (OS updates non-withstanding).

But yes, currently, you are very much dependent on your point of purchase for updates. However, with cryptography, proof of ownership (and accompanying access to updates) could be obtained in other ways.

I vaguely remember hearing about this earlier. It's awful. Even if they want to implement DRM at least do it right...
I feel like this should be a suable offense by Ubisoft - even if it was mentioned in the ToS it's still just straight-up stupid and should be considered stealing. I don't care they have control over the license. The guy who got banned didn't even do anything wrong. Imagine buying anything IRL and the manufacturer breaks into your home and takes it back because you didn't read the fine text that needed three magnifiers to see. Not an entirely accurate analogy but it's similar to this, except in digital form. Hilarious that they think anti-consumer practises would bring in more customers.