It might, depending on the publisher, if you can provide proof of purchase. I once contacted THQ Nordic about getting a Steam key for Red Faction Guerilla, gave them my serial key for the defunct GFWL version and they sent me back a code for the Steam version. But I'm guessing many are too greedy to give out anything if they don't have to.

Simple solution. Buy more games from GOG so they don't go under.

It's the same problem with all platforms when they should shut down:
No more dowloads or activations are possible. So that's not a GOG specific problem.

As already said, you benefit from DRM freeness in that way that you are able to make backups which can be afterwards installed without a client and online activation/check.

For example if you want to install a game on Steam you won't be able to do that without connecting to their servers, even if you bought a retail version of a game with DVD. So if their servers go down you are screwed.

Here on GOG you can download offline Installers patched to the latest version of the game.

Well, that's why I have all my games (windows only though) and extras backed up already and doing it periodically with gogrepo. And if GOG goes belly up, I'm sure the community can figure out a way for everyone to get access to what they've lost ;)

Good questions. As you have probably already seen from the answers, DRM-free doesn't mean that there is a whole infrastructure behind that ensures that you have access to your games no matter what comes. In the end, that just may be asked for too much. DRM-free just means that you own the right to use a copy of the product permanently, but the practical need to store the copy is on you.

In reality this means that either nobody should have more than say a hundred games (because with updates and extras over time that will surely require you to buy some terabyte hard discs (not impossible, but not everyone may have them).

Buying the whole catalogue of GOG and storing the games completely (maybe with different versions, they are frequently updated) may not be feasible for now.

GOG Galaxy also works directly against this. They want you to have the copies stored on their servers (which is problematic for the above mentioned reasons) and get updates on the fly. If GOG shuts down, GOG Galaxy will not magically give you your games. GOG should clearly say this and be absolutely honest about the disadvantages of not storing the games locally with (do they still call it classic?) installers.

What we would actually need is some kind of cloud space that stores files for users, but if multiple users store the same file, the cloud space stores it only once. Actually that leads to the interesting question, if I can store my downloaded GOG games in any cloud somewhere? Am I allowed to do this?

DRM-free just means that there are no technical mechanisms in place to restrict ("manage") your ability to copy or use the software. Of course, in GOG's case this only applies to single player, and they're ok with certain types of restriction mechanisms even for single player. Yes.

What is or isn't feasible varies from person to person, but you highlight an important point.

Downloading the classic installers allows you to preserve "un-updated" versions of a game, which I am finding increasingly important as I do not care for many of the "improvements" made to newer games due to user feedback. It is a big advantage of DRM-free to be able to back up multiple versions. I wish they were all available for download though, as it stands now if you want the "un-updated" version you'd have to buy right away on launch or miss out on it (I know Galaxy has some kind of "rollback" feature but I am talking about offline).

Forget what everyone else wrote because now I am here to answer to your questions. These are the ultimate answers. No, that would be physically impossible. If GOG servers were shut down, you couldn't download anything from them because the servers wouldn't be sending any IP packets to you.

However, as long as you have downloaded your purchased games BEFORE that shutdown happens, you are all good. It is the same as if you buy a CD game or a DVD movie from a store, as long as you bring it home with you and don't leave it at the store, you are all good even if that store closes down permanently.

If, however, you leave that CD or DVD into the store after purchasing it and the store shuts down, no amount of crying is going to help. You can't get that CD/DVD out of the store anymore, you should have brought it with you while the store was still open. Ok? First you have to clarify to yourself what you mean by "owning a game".

When you purchase a game, you own a LICENSE to use that game. However, you don't own that game's intellectual property rights, as in that it would be legal for you to make copies of that game and sell that as if it was your production.

Even if the store (GOG) closed down, you still own the licenses to the games you have purchased, just like you still own a license to that DVD movie or PS3 game you bought from the Mom&Pop Video Gaming Store before they closed down. Just because the store closed down doesn't mean you aren't allowed to watch or play that DVD movie or PS3 game.

Same with GOG games. Even if the GOG store closed down, you still have the right to keep playing the games you bought from the store, as long as you have downloaded those games from the store already. The "DRM-free"-part here means that there are no technical restrictions for you to keep playing the game after the closure. On a store/service where there is DRM, you might be unable to install and play your downloaded game, a game for which you still own the license (to play).

The (closed down) GOG store, nor the publisher, is not obliged to offer you a replacement copy, in case you failed to download the game(s) from GOG before, or have misplaced the downloaded games.

Now, whether the license to a (GOG) game allows you to download a pirated copy online and keep playing that... that is a bit trickier question and grey area. A court might view it that you had a license only to the exact GOG version that you could have downloaded from the GOG store. Even if you were going to download a GOG version from some torrent site, the bittorrent p2p technology usually means you are also sharing the game to other downloaders, something that the license never permitted, so you would be breaking the license right there as well.

Nah, it is just simpler that you download the standalone offline GOG game installers before the potential shutdown, and that's that. When you buy a game from GOG, you get a receipt of the purchase to your email account. Those emails are your proof of purchase, if you ever needed to prove that you own a license to the GOG games you have on your hard drive.

I hope this is all now crystal clear, because if it isn't, this could become a loooooong night.

^ Agree 100%. Initially it was just "what if anything happens to GOG" for me, but more recently there have been a number of incidents like Steam forcibly removing soundtracks for everyone in GTA IV (which wasn't a legal requirement after they expired) to a few "work in progress" games like This War of Mine where changes to the "base game" in order to accommodate the newest DLC often seems to add more bugs / performance issues than the old stable releases and if you aren't interested in the newest DLC, then it's better to keep the old installers un-updated since GOG don't offer older versions of offline installers, thus if you delete them when 'upgrading' then regret it later, they'll be gone for good little different than if GOG disappeared. For this reason I've also got into the habit of backing up mods just in case they get updated for a newer version that I'm not using which then breaks something on older versions. Same goes for unwanted balance changes.

As for the feasibility of backing up hundreds of games, it's entirely possible especially for older games. Eg, for every big +20-50GB Dragon Age Origins / Divinity Original Sin 2 title, there may be several sub-100MB games from DOS titles to light-weight stuff like Escape Goat (44MB) or VVVVVV (66MB). I have a few titles that are +20GB and plenty between 1-19GB, but the actual mean average when including many smaller older DOS / 1990's games is under 1GB.

According to my reading of the GOG user agreement, purchasing a game is not a precondition to having a license to download and use GOG games. If you search for license and licence (yes, they use both spellings...) there's no further elaboration on when or how this license is granted to you, so one can only assume it's automatically granted as soon as you agree to the agreement.

It seems so wasteful for every single one of us to download the same installers and each individually storing them. Might be more environmentally friendly, and cheaper for all of us to pay GOG a few pence each to put their catalog and ownership lists in escrow.

Really??
=P

Disk space is cheap; you can easily have hundreds of games on an average modern hard drive with plenty of space left. I do. Some people have >1000 with no problems. Most games aren't 60GB+ AAA games. That doesn't really work unless you store all versions of the game. There are a couple games I deliberately don't update and wouldn't want the latest version.

Wasteful, or safer due to increased redundancy? Also lots of people have crappy internet. Plus cloud stuff tends to get hacked with disturbing frequency. I'll take my local copies, thank you.

Can't say I care for the idea of babysitting and regularly updating terabytes of spinning rust only to find out that they're corrupting your data just when you actually needed it.

OK, so don't? I don't "regularly update terabytes," nor is any of it corrupted, due to the magic of redundancy and checksums, plus half of it is SSD (which isn't always more reliable than HDD, though, just faster/less energy/more expensive). "The cloud" isn't magic sky dust, it's just hard drives. Perhaps we'll be using 5D data storage sometime. ("360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C)").