This is the way. I do the same but I still haven't moved from DVD's :) This. OP, do not use a SSD for long term storage, thats a terrible idea. SSD's are only meant to be used for stuff that gets a lot of IO operations, like an Operating System, databases, or games. Using it for cold storage is a terrible idea, as they will lose their charge and lose all data with it. HDD's will still provide you with more than enough speed to install your games when you need to. This is WRONG. This news spread out with ambiguous headlines and it soon it evolved into mass misinformation.

The actual news were: Sony themselves will stop producing recordable Blu Ray discs. Only, and I mean only, BD-R's and the like. They won't stop producing regular discs like movie or game discs, nor are they killing off the format in any way. As for BD-R's, there are more producers than just Sony. Verbatim is a well-known one. Blu Ray is still alive and well despite all the misinformation trying to kill it alongside all physical media.

Reading some of the replies in here, I think we should reboot the game buying support group ;D Like others I (usually) backup everything. I also don't have to wory about space as many of my games are small in size. That said, I dislike the hoarding tendencies and procrastination such helps to enable so i've been cutting back on buying.

I'm in process of backing up my most-loved GOG games, but hope in time to back up everything. I've used multiple 8TB drives but am moving toward catalogued thumb drives. Moreso than storage my issue is internet speed; each bit travels by donkey from Poland to my PC! ;)

LOL, I've got a backlog myself. Still haven't played the Sherlock Holmes games I bought last year, and more than 20 others. :P

Lately i've found the best solution to this is to just find some free time and just start one random game from my current favorite genre. So far i've completed a handful of games...only several hundred to go :)

I might try that, but I've been hung up on Duke Nukem lately. I bought it at the (other) store and playing through it. Brings back memories.

"I'm gonna put the smack dab on your @ss".

"I 'aint afraid of no Quake". Funny, I had Quake 1, and I thought DN was better, but that's me. :P

Ah the good ol' nostalgia trap/timesink. I am doing similar with Shadow Warrior classic atm :)

Shadow Warrior sounds familiar but I've never played it. I even skipped over Doom when it was available. I've never played it. If you're old enough to remember, we had big box stores where you could buy PC games on cd. Anyone remember Circuit City?
I bought a lot of games from them.

Shoot, when I was in middle school, I remember playing Oregon Trail on a green monochrome screen. When I was a teenager when Radio Shack was a thing, I would spend HOURS playing F117 Stealth Fighter (it looked very DOS'y) on a Tandy. The salesman actually told me to leave once, lol, cause I'd play for hours. Gawd I feel like I'm sixteen again.

I don't know about anyone, but, does anyone think that game graphics really haven't improved much since about 2005/2010? I have seen videos on youtube of console games from that era, they looked so realistic. I think game graphics have hit a wall in realism. What do you think? Yeah, games have gotten monstrously big, due to bigger textures and the such, but not more realistic in the last 10 or 15 years IMHO.

It's asian stereotype warrior monk ninja Duke Nukem. Funny and well worth the time to play it if you like Duke..
(speaking of, there are a few DN references in a few levels)

I memba them and Babbages, as well as Electronics Boutique.

That more time should be put into touches like creative secrets and the interactive light switches/etc in DN3D.

Same here. Many games from the late 2000s like Crysis, Mirror's Edge, and Killzone 2 still look good today. We also didn't need blurry TAA ghosting that makes games look like it's rendering at half the resolution back then.

Not only that but some 7th gen 2005-2013 games still has more detail than 9th gen AAA games in the 2020s. Even the original 2006 Xbox 360 version of Dead Rising has more attention to detail than the 2024 Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster remake made for PCs and consoles with 32 times more RAM than the Xbox 360...

Fun fact: The most expensive game produced in the 7th generation of consoles (GTA 5) only takes 17GB of storage space in the old original PS3/X360 1.00 version. Compare that to the newest PS5/PC version that takes over 140GB of storage space so it now takes more storage space than some 9th gen open world games made in the 2020s...

Wrong. Why wouldn't you back up everything? Seems like it would take more effort to pick and choose which ones to keep than just doing it all. Also, what's the point of buying an expensive SSD for backups? It's simple enough to get a 10+TB hard drive for that; it's not like you need fast random access in this case. Not to mention that newer high-density SSDs are more prone to data loss after remaining unpowered for some time, which is kind of the opposite of what you want for backup purposes. Hard drives will also eventually suffer data degradation if unused for long periods of time but it usually takes a lot longer.

This is a good question and makes me think. Why back up everything? If you want to play said games or pass them on so your children/family/etc can play them, perhaps, but otherwise it isn't needed as much. Yes, some will say "preservation", but there are already a number of sites and groups (including legit legal ones) doing that. In the end, we collect and collect and do our best to justify our collecting with so many reasons.
(note: I am simply musing and not trying to deride anyone who collects of backs up their games)

For about 10 years, I've been backing up all my GOG games to DVD. However, that got a bit ungainly when I went looking for games among my stacks of DVDs, so I began slacking off and wasn't backing anything up for about 5 years.

Then last year, I figured I'd better get all my gog games in one convenient location, so I purchased an 18TB HDD and spent a few months downloading all of my offline installers and all associated files for every single one of my 1200 games. When I was all done, those 1200 games had consumed only 9TB of the drive, or about half.

The great thing about it is that all of those games fit nicely into a drive that's about the size of a paperback book that sits unobtrusively on a shelf, or anywhere else you'd like to put it, and can all be accessed and installed easily through the OS. It's easy, and I worry about my games a lot less.

As soon as I can manage it though, I'll be picking up a second 18TB HDD to back up the first one. These drives aren't all that expensive, and it's well worth the cost to protect my relatively large investment purchasing all those games over the last 15 years here.

It all comes down to how you want to protect your investment? Do you want to protect your investment yourself, and have control of it yourself, or are you happy leaving that responsibility to some other random person or cloud entity?

I've spent enough money on games that I want to know that I can access them quickly at any time, whenever I want to play them. I don't want to spend time hunting down on the internet, the files of games I've already paid for, and hoping I can find them somewhere.

You do you, but I've got all mine in a small box the size of a small book. If anything happens to those games now, I have only myself to blame.