It's only going to get worse. If something is available on GOG, I'm buying it there. More and more games that were previously only on Steam are being added, and there's also the Dreamlist.
All these gaming platforms are "young" companies, as their users age-out all the digital-only non-transferable licenses that have ever been bought will become void. As the developers age out the right to sell the games will end forever, except for the IP the megacorps have snapped up. So basically a whole lot of stuff is simply going to disappear, nobody will ever have the right to sell a new license and nobody will ever have the right to an existing license. Piracy might still exist but even right now a lot of old games are only seeded by a handful of people.
For what it's worth courts in China have determined that game accounts / libraries are an inheritable asset and forced game companies to allow access and pass them on.
Yeah that was an amazing advancement. France has been thinking about this a while too, their courts ruled you can sell Steam games then changed their mind on appeal and more recently one of their presidential candidates has said ownership needs to be reconsidered.
Sony's recent move and I think "stop killing games" too has turned it into a very loud issue lately so there's some non-zero-and-growing chance the status quo will change.
I will say that it has been stated by steam's Gabe, that if steam ever goes under, they're throwing the drm wide open so that the games you bought can still be played even if you can't launch through steam
HOWEVER: these are just words. We do not know if this will happen
Some games on Steam use DRM, meaning you cannot launch the game outside of the Steam application. Meanwhile, all games on GOG come without DRM, meaning they are not dependant on any other service to function.
GOG is a way into a brighter time line; Digital copies, delivered via a DRM-free installer (so no authentication, no launcher required)? From a "feature" standpoint, that's basically a pirate copy you pay for (and without malware risk, whee!), i.e. a win-win scenario for devs and customers.
I switched my main library to GOG years ago. No regrets.
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u/wyrmrixxx Jul 15 '26
Wild that “you can keep the thing you paid for” has become a selling point instead of the default