How a childish idea could be some other person's fault?
It's not a matter of having backups or not, it's more a matter of a service that can go down on a whim, a service reliability, and people that think nothing about their customers other than when they give them money.

More press coverage, rah!

There's a very good way of thanking the DOSBox project, look for that big honking "donate" button on their site :)

"Marcin Iwinski: One of the first developers we sat with was Charles Cecil for the Broken Sword series, and he’s a great guy. It’s really a pleasure to do business with him"

and i guess many are still waiting for broken sword 1 (and/or the director's cut), you know... *hinthint*

Oh come on - I bet they'll be no less happy being paid in nature!
More precisely, promo codes (:

I knew every minute that they could go down in a whim... that EVERY download shop could go down in a whim... that's WHY i make backups and am thankful for GOG to distribute DRM free software that continues to work even when they close their doors... ;)

So i was sad when they "closed" but had no reason to be angry... :)

I think Guillaume may have misunderstood when the interviewer asked: "What's your plan if you actually have to close down the site?"

Obviously the changes that you made to your site means it is more stable, and presumably you've fixed it so that it can be updated and upscaled without down-time.

But I think the question is: What will happen when GOG.com finally becomes unprofitable? Can gamers who have paid for content be assured that there is a permanent archive somewhere on the Internet where they can download or re-download their purchases?

This is one of the biggest questions about online distribution generally. At least GOG's stuff is DRM-free so people who have already downloaded their purchases will not find their games suddenly stop working...

Ultimately, I think this is going to be one for the courts. Digital information is such a departure from any other kind of material thing that determining what, exactly, the end user purchased and what responsibilities some publishers or distributors will have.

But GOG seems fairly straightforward. While they offer your game on the site for you to download for all time, there's absolutely nothing to suggest that the burden of storage or backup of what you've purchased is their responsibility.

Essentially, we've just cut out a lot of middle men. Instead of the publisher burning the game to a disc, packaging, and send it out to the store, we're instead downloading it to store however we see fit. You could burn it to a CD/DVD, or a hard drive, or 12,000 floppy disks, or memorize every single line of code.

Having the games here to download while GOG is here is a perk, but I think it would prove to be the burden of the buyer to view it as buying a product meant to be backed up by the end user; I think the fact that you can't play them directly from the site itself backs that assumption up.

The only times it would be tricky would be if GOG shut down in the middle of a download, or you bought like 30 games at once and then GOG closed without you being able to download any of them for backup.

I wonder what rulings, if any, courts have already made dealing with this. Might have to look that up.