Say it with me kids: Corporations are NEVER your friends. At best you have mutual interests, for a time.

Just look back to everyone who was all in on Google because "Do no evil" and "They aren't Apple" and so forth. Unity when they were the underdog relative to Unreal. Reddit when they were the "counter culture" social media. And so forth.

I like GoG a lot and have since they first launched. I also remember the French Monk Incident and so forth.

They’re preserving it as much as they’re able to

So we are giving participation awards? GoG use digital preservation as a marketing point. They aren't doing that. And they are arguably making for a false sense of security (some might go even farther...) when people think that buying a game from a major dev and European publisher is digital preservation.

How would you feel if Crunchyroll started arguing they were the good guys because they were releasing Witch from Mercury for 100 USD?

Now for the fun part!

Or similar to any physical object you ever bought (hard drive space / shelf space), for that matter?

Yeah. As in it is "preserved" up until someone does a cross country move or merges their life with a partner who doesn't see why you need to have every single Blizzard Battle Chest on a giant shelf in the living room.

You mean, just like any pre digital purchasing game that you own on disks?

Yes. Because bit rot is a thing and people need to be aware of that and actually preserve that data. Hmm, I wonder who could help with that...

They’re preserving it as much as they’re able to without being a government funded museum.

Good news. You don't have to be a government funded museum. In fact, governments are kind of an active threat to these because they are in a REALLY grey area legally. And publishers (like CD Projekt...) tend to go after them both legally and not legally.

I very much disagree that just having a copy of a game is games preservation but it is part of it. And orgs like The Internet Archive are preserving both the media itself AND the media and culture about said media. And they and their associates put the legwork in to reach out to people who have those big boxes or scratched up discs and preserve things BEFORE it is time to make room for the new baby. And they don't have fancy deals with publishers to help market for donations. They have to ask.

So if you actually care about digital preservation? https://archive.org/donate?origin=iawww-TopNavDonateButton

Whereas, if you just want to spend money and react to FOMO?

Which GOG makes possible by offering DRM-free and offline installers.

I know several big GOG customers download all offline installers and keep them on their own NAS. Some even keep the different versions.

For data that is "mine"? Yeah.

But the average steam library (from just asking chatgpt because i am lazy) is 30-100 games for a "normal" user and 200-300 games for an "enthusiast". Assuming 10 GB per game on average (which is woefully small these days) and you are expecting people to spend 1-3 TB of storage on just their game installers alone. AND that is assuming none of those installers get updates and people need to figure out which ones (most of us who lived through The French Monk incident can attest to that).

So what happens is "oh, someone else will back it up" and so forth. And it means EVERYONE is grabbing torrents for Spec Ops The Line and not just the people who didn't think to buy a copy while they could.