Apples and oranges yes, but to most users (even Linux users) there's only a very blurry line between these concepts. I admit this is not ideal. I believe choice of storefront is more a service and support problem, and less about the product itself.

Game licensure and game ownership are equivalent at the end of the day in most instances. Rugs could be pulled, yes, but thus far haven't been very often or to any significant extent (that I know of).

Most paying customers are fine to run proprietary code or accept DRM. Even Linux users will do this if the company (Valve) has a decent track record at practicing "don't be evil" (they do).

As a Linux user, when you get a game from GOG (and I concede that this is ideologically superior to a license from Valve) you are on your own afterwards. Windows users can get a bit of help from Galaxy and I think GOG even does tech support now but this doesn't apply to our segment.

You must now divine a scheme whereby your game is made runnable. Cue fighting with distro repositories and Wine versions/prefixes, depending on a third party launcher (Bottles/Lutris/Heroic/pick one), or adding the game to the Steam client (that you probably have installed already anyway) because Steam knows how to run things with Proton... and then you must maintain this going forward.

This might not bother you or you may even find it therapeutic. But the majority of the segment doesn't like it, and it won't scale as well as a first-party solution, not even for an individual user.

My assertion is that exchanging game ownership for game licensure currently looks like a pretty fair deal if I receive first-party support for running the game on my OS. But GOG could change that.

There is also minigalaxy

You have an executable with gog, but playing it forever requires long term support.

I don’t expect whatever windows may or may not be available in 2060 to be able to support such a download from 2025 in a playable fashion.

I think this is a moot argument, especially for x86 arch. I can run nearly almost any game built for windows 98 - till now, on linux.

Any game ever can run very well on any modern hardware using emulators or virtual machines.

That is quite false, especially if you mean "out of the box". And it's likely a temporary situation - there's no guarantee whatsoever that people will maintain x86 and some specific Nvidia Pixel Shader emulation support 50 years from now.

This has already happened, PC Gaming Wiki has entries for lots of games where support for various old methods of doing things no longer work, on real hardware on windows, and you need to use a variety of workarounds like dgvoodoo or a fix by a random third party modder to get the game to operate correctly. And that's before you consider defunct copy protection or trying to add improvements.

nVidia has dropped 32-bit PhysX support in 50-series cards, significantly impacting some older-but-not-old games, and there’s no real solution yet except to own an older card.

Given the amount of work emulator authors go to supporting consoles like the Neo Geo CD, with 8 not very good games (they had to do serious work, over many years, breaking the encryption), and the amazing cycle accurate emulators for consoles like NES and SNES, I’m confident we will continue to have good emulators in the future for any system anyone cares about.

There was an awkward period of 3d accelerated games that required 16-bit framebuffers; I've had no success getting them to run in emulation

I fully expect windows to not support such games.

And I also fully expect wine on linux to support them all. I like a lot of old games, and they run much better under wine than in windows these days.

> you can download, install and play all gog games forever with no drm.

Many games that GOG sells and a very large share of the new releases are DRMed. The Galaxy client is often how the DRM gets applied.

Want to play HoMM3 with your friends? You can still do that.

Try doing the same thing with a more recent "DRM-free" game.

> Many games that GOG sells and a very large share of the new releases are DRMed. The Galaxy client is often how the DRM gets applied.

Can you explain that assertion?

That's not in any way what gog says. Even california law says gog sells you games (while steam only licenses them)

https://www.gog.com/about_gog

I have a disconnected windows 11 vm, and install and play gog games in it all the time. Never an issue.

> That's not in any way what gog says.

Jesus Christ. It's exactly what GOG says. Compare https://www.gog.com/en/news/bgog_2022_update_2b_our_commitme...

> 1. The single-player mode has to be accessible offline.

> 2. Games you bought and downloaded can never be taken from you or altered against your will.

> 3. The GOG GALAXY client is and will remain optional for accessing single-player offline mode.

> Having said that, we believe that you have the right to make an informed choice about the content that you choose to enjoy and we won’t tell you how and where you can access or store your games. To make it easier to discover titles that include features like multiplayer, unlockable cosmetics, timed events, or user-generated content, we’re adding information about such functionalities on product pages. In short, you’ll always know.

If you want to play multiplayer HoMM3, you can. That's how the game was commercially released and it hasn't been updated to add DRM.

Modern releases DRM the game as a matter of course, and GOG defied their user base to say that that's fine with them. Do you want to play with your friend? You need an internet connection and multiple accounts registered with the vendor.

For a concrete example of Galaxy being the DRM implementation, the Gloomhaven executable you can download from GOG has the button to play multiplayer disabled. It will still work if you get around that - the functionality itself doesn't check anything. But the executable will only enable the button if you start it with Galaxy running and logged in to an account that, according to GOG, has purchased the game.

That doesn't sound like "digital rights management" to you?

That sounds like the game has implemented multiplayer in a way that requires an external server to me, not like DRM proper. DRM would block single player as well.

In the first place, you do not appear to have any idea what "DRM" means.

In the second place, Gloomhaven does not require an external server. One player hosts the game (using the same executable used to play it), and other players connect to it. The control is exactly what I described: if you launch the game in an unapproved manner, the button that takes you to the "start or join a multiplayer game" interface is disabled. The functionality still works fine.

Note also that this is a board game, so there is no single-player gameplay. If you need to play without other people, you can control multiple players.

> In the first place, you do not appear to have any idea what "DRM" means.

I know perfectly well what DRM means. No need to get nasty.

> I know perfectly well what DRM means.

This statement is not compatible with your prior comments. Do you know what it means or not?

> Many games that GOG sells and a very large share of the new releases are DRMed. The Galaxy client is often how the DRM gets applied.

I haven't ever encountered this, nor have I ever encountered a GOG game that requires the use of the Galaxy client.

I’ve never used Gog galaxy and i have over 250 games in my library?