Edit to expand on this: A truly offline forever-purchase of physical goods can be re-sold. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine (this is the US-specific version, other jurisdictions may have similar doctrines).

American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property.

A digital "purchase" is usually non-transferable, even from GOG. It can't be removed from your own HDD once you download the installer, but there are still restrictions attached on what you can do with it, even if those are limited and hard to enforce.

[–] TheEntity@lemmy.world 15 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Just like any game ever sold on a CD.

[–] xapr@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 4 weeks ago

Technically, probably yes, but you can buy old, opened games on eBay. I doubt you can do the same with GOG games. Digital media is much harder if not impossible to resell.

[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 8 points 4 weeks ago

If you back up the folder of a steam installed game that doesn't need steam to run, what's the difference?

Owning the copy in a legal sense doesn't affect most of the userbase tbh.

[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

unless you keep the offline installers.

[–] Voyajer@lemmy.world 20 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I mean at that point you can just make backups of your steam games too. A lot work straight from the exe and for the rest there are steam simulators.

[–] GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 weeks ago

Well, gentlemen. I guess we got this all sorted out. Not a big deal, after all.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

A small minority of GOG games have DRM, a majority of Steam games have a form of DRM. "Use a simulator" isn't a solution, I shouldn't need a third party program to play the games I paid for.

Also there's a pretty big difference between downloading the installer and backing up the installed files, one is an intended backup solution, the other is a workaround.

[–] yamanii@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

Which gog games have DRM? The costumers over there even protested Hitman's inclusion in the store precisely because without internet you can't unlock anything in the game, GOG even removed it from sale.