You raise a good point: with all online game stores, including GOG, if you don’t have the game installer in your system you risk losing it because of some licensing reasons.
So to fully protect yourself from that risk with GOG you have to download the game offline installers.
The difference in this between GOG and other stores is that:
GOG actually has offline installers and makes it easy for you to get them (either from their web pages or, as explained by somebody else below, using software that connects to their systems and just fetches them automatically)
GOG enforces that games sold via their store do not have DRM and cannot require networking access to install or run
For all their games GOG makes available the tools for you to protect yourself from losing games due to the store having to pull them door or going bankrupt, plus makes sure they won’t stop working (at least for single player mode) at some point due to some 3rd party switching their servers off, but you still have to do your part.
The other stores don’t even give you that option or protection. I mean, sometimes for some games you can make it happen (for example some game installers can be copied from the Steam cache and later used and the game run without Steam), just not reliably, not seamlessly and you’re not told upfront for which ones that works, so you don’t get to make an informed purchasing decision if you care about still being able to play a game a decade from now.
Unlike the others GOG give you the option and the guarantee that it works, the rest if up to you.
You raise a good point: with all online game stores, including GOG, if you don’t have the game installer in your system you risk losing it because of some licensing reasons.
So to fully protect yourself from that risk with GOG you have to download the game offline installers.
The difference in this between GOG and other stores is that:
For all their games GOG makes available the tools for you to protect yourself from losing games due to the store having to pull them door or going bankrupt, plus makes sure they won’t stop working (at least for single player mode) at some point due to some 3rd party switching their servers off, but you still have to do your part.
The other stores don’t even give you that option or protection. I mean, sometimes for some games you can make it happen (for example some game installers can be copied from the Steam cache and later used and the game run without Steam), just not reliably, not seamlessly and you’re not told upfront for which ones that works, so you don’t get to make an informed purchasing decision if you care about still being able to play a game a decade from now.
Unlike the others GOG give you the option and the guarantee that it works, the rest if up to you.
I appreciate the write up!