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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> you’re not buying games you’re leasing them

Counterpoint, the cost of "owning" offline games is not zero and their lifetime is not infinite.

I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting them to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck. (In fact, for nearly all that I care about I also have bought a Steam license in addition).

Ultimately, everything comes down to user experience. We can pat ourselves on the back for buying something forever, but experiences and the media they are stored on are both transitory.

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Yea 100% it’s not as easy to use. But as far as I’m aware Steam doesn’t provide any guarantee games will keep working and GOG actually has it as a mission statement that, as least those selected as “Good Old Games”, will[0]. Now of course that requires GOG to survive so it’s sorta the same thing like you’re saying.

But I’d argue there is a material difference between “if you try hard you can run an original copy of Doom” and “if business X decided so you can never access those things again”.

0: https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program

Not to disagree, but proton has made it quite easy to run games I've previously struggled with. The nice thing is that it works with any binary, not just those you've purchased. Yes, it's wine, but valve has done wonders for its performance and compatibility.

This.

And if it doesn't wanna work on Proton, GEProton might work. I've had a few games like that. (I usually default to the latter and use the former as a fallback.)

GOG's mission statement is applied very selectively. For a long time they did not support windows 10, and even now it's really spotty. It's frequently on a per-game basis, and sometimes games that used to work, don't anymore.

Yeah but at least you can get the games. On my old MacBook (my only "modern" Mac), Steam auto-updated itself to a version that no longer runs on that machine. If that was my only computer (luckily it's not), I'd not only be completely locked out of the games I already installed, I'd also be unable to install any others -- despite the fact the games run perfectly on the machine. At least on GOG I can just go to the website and download the installers, no matter what [relatively-recent] computer I'm using.

> I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting them to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck.

Anything? Inc. the recommended spec platform?

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