timppu: Yeah, those paranoid Desura customers... :) Also, that's a straw man argument anyway, as I didn't see anyone claiming that e.g. GOG would go under 'anytime soon'. The only one who said 'anytime soon' was you, twice :)

I think the whole Desura case is a good real life case of these kinds of things, ie. how quickly things may change (it seems it came as a surprise to most that Desura suddenly shuts its doors), will there be problems when thousands upon thousands of users are hurrying to download all their games from the service at the same time, etc. Some have reported of server problems with Desura, so maybe it is a good idea to download the games before others do, in case you care to keep your games. Naturally if you don't care, then everything is fine, don't do anything.

For me it is not so black and white. I consider both the "cloud" (in this case GOG servers) and my external hard drives as my GOG backups, at alternative places. So for me it is not either-or, it is both. If one fails for any reason, it is good to be able to fall back to the alternative. I have more control over my local copies that they won't fail, though.

At this point the local backups are more important to me for places i don't visit frequently anymore, e.g. GamersGate, DotEmu, Frictional Games homepage and Strategy First homepage. I consider it far more convenient for me that I keep local backups of the DRM-free games i've bought from those sites, rather than visiting them whenever I want to play some game from them. I just select one of their game installers from my external hard drive in order to install and play it. No need to try to remember the login details, where their homepage is, do they have some kind of client you need to use to download the game etc.

Someone might claim PBay is also another backup place, but:

- I can't easily check how up to date those versions are.

- There are no guarantees that the torrents are clean. I rather get them from a secure and official place, or keep them to myself.

- Possible legal problems, especially as normally torrent clients share the files as you download. You could block the sharing and only leech, but then if most people decide to do the same, good luck trying to download them. The whole p2p depends on the idea that people share what they download.

- PBay has been blocked here for a long time already, and they seem to be having lots of other problems with Swedish authorities lately. So much for torrents always being there for you...

So, i guess the Desura case is a great litmus test here too: for the people who have even thousands of downloadable Desura games, how easy it is for them to get the up-to-date versions from torrent sites?

zeroxxx: Desura has never been a good business.

zeroxxx: And do you really buy games from Desura? If not, that argument is a moot.