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When people purchase the game, will they have a digital copy on their hard drive? Or will they be beholden to the company staying in business and keeling the servers running?

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That train has left the station for at least 15 years. Your 'digital copy' is useless if the DRM servers are down (GoG's DRM free games are a notable exception).

Might be a notable exception but i have almost a thousand of those exceptions :-P. Also while Steam itself is needed for the initial download, some games can just be copied to another place and work fine, especially indie games that do not bother with DRM. A bigger issue is the Steamworks APIs but if you only care about singleplayer games there are drop-in replacements like Goldberg's emulator[0] which is opensource (LGPL).

(also there are more places to buy DRM-free games than only GOG - e.g. itch.io, Zoom Platform, GamersGate and Humble Store to name a few - though GOG has most of the games)

[0] https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

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