I presume by "GOG content" they mean stuff you can download from the GOG service. If you get it from some other source than your GOG account, it is not under that rule.

I guess the important part is when they mention the IP rights holder of the game may (=does) have additional restrictions in their license agreement. After all, it is the publisher who has the IP rights to the game, not GOG (unless the game is specifically published by GOG Ltd, like Fantasy General and the SSI Gold Box games).

So you've a handful of games.

You're telling that disk space is cheap, but if you need terabytes of redundant storage (and the requirements are constantly growing as new games arrive on the store), it's not going to be that cheap. And unless you vastly overprovision today (expensive), yes, you're going to have to upgrade that storage rig regularly.

I have an up-to-date collection of my 1746 GOG games on an external 2.5" USB hard drive (5 TB). In my case:

"Babysitting" = running one command (a .bat file using gogrepo.py) which automatically checks for any new or updated content for any of my owned GOG games, and downloads them if needed. It also cleans up any obsolete files from my GOG collection, and verifies the files checking their integrity (with md5 checksums for the game installers, and zip integrity for the extras).

I run that magic babysitting command when I feel like it, maybe once a month, sometimes more often if I have just bought a bunch of games.

Also, if you are afraid of bitrot, there are filesystems like ZFS and Btrfs which are resistant to it and have "autohealing" features against file corruption. I think there are Windows drivers for both filesystems so you can use them also with Windows.

Those mentioned additional contract terms are only there in some games. You'll see this text on some store pages:

"ACCEPTANCE OF END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT REQUIRED TO PLAY"

Who owns the IP rights is irrelevant, it's up to GOG to make sure the rights holder has granted them the right to give us a license. If they don't have that right, then they shouldn't be selling us a game.

People have to download their games anyway to play them, so why not just copy the files to a backup drive during install time? Backup drives don't use any electricity at all when they're unplugged, and many people need them anyway for their own data, photos, documents, etc. One man's "waste" is another man's "redundancy".

I'm not even sure that's legal. Eg, if GOG is funding this "3rd party escrow" and went out of business, then there goes the primary funding source for paying that same "3rd party escrow" service to keep GOG games on there. And if GOG ever disappears and takes download servers offline then so too will go authentication / account servers alongside them, ie, how is this escrow service going to know who owns what given they couldn't verify ownership but also can't let just anyone download anything as they'll be clobbered with piracy lawsuits from publishers of games? If GOG isn't around and publishers claim that escrow service has no distribution rights to allow downloads of their games post-GOG do you think they'll try and fight multiple lawsuits after having their income already cut off or just delete the data?...

How do people think photographers backup large photo collections, home cinema enthusiasts backup huge ripped movie collections, Youtubers archive all their uploads, businesses backup financial records, etc? "The cloud" has it's place as part of a backup strategy but it isn't a backup strategy purely by itself, nor is backing up a couple of TB's of data offline in general some insurmountable task on par with climbing Mount Everest that some try and make it out to be...

If your GOG installer hard drive is only half-full, nothing is stopping you from using the free space for something else. So in that sense "overprovisioning" is not a problem.

Also, with modern systems like LVM, you don't have to replace your GOG archive drive with a bigger one, but instead just add a new hard drive and add it to the same volume.

Risk vs reward - time - effort - money.

Losing your photo collection could mean these photos will never ever be seen again. Are those important photos? If so, then you back them up thrice!

Losing some game installers that thousands of people (and all the pirate sites, probably) already have, well that's essentially public information.

Rather than hoard such easily available (and only artificially scarce) data, I prefer to find better things to spend my time and money and worries on.
Don't have much else. I've got maybe around 500 GB of storage across all my computers. Only SSDs, no spinning rust.

I pretty much quit hoarding data after my 3TB RAID blew up a few years ago. That's one less thing to worry about. Does LVM implement some kind of redundancy? Just throwing new drives at the volume sounds like a way to keep increasing the likelihood of failure.

It's hard to backup hundreds of game installers reliably. Most people don't have multiple TB drives handy to save them to twice over. GOG should announce well ahead of time if they plan to shut down, giving you plenty of time to do what you have to do then. In the meantime I just rely on the service, and occasionally backup my favorites.

GOG is passing the license (to play the game).

That is why games sometime disappear from the GOG service, as the IP rights holder changes (and GOG doesn't have a permission from the new IP rights holder to pass the licenses to the affected games), or the IP rights holder pulls the game from GOG. So GOG doesn't have any kind of irrevocable right to grant licenses to the games.

However, when the IP rights holder changes or the game is pulled from the GOG service, that doesn't invalidate the license (to play the game you purchased from the store) for the end-users.

Thank heavens for gogrepo, with it it is easy.

My view is that as long as the GOG service is up and running, the GOG servers are the secondary backup of my purchased games. Hence, no need for now to keep local double backups of my GOG games (or a RAID system with redundancy). If it so happened that my 5TB HDD suddenly blew up and I'd lost all my local GOG game installers... I guess I'd redownload them all over again (maybe in parts). Then again, usually HDDs tend to start giving warning signs when they are becoming unhealthy, I e.g. had another big archive HDD which started to warn with S.M.A.R.T. that things are not fine, so I moved the stuff to a healthy drive.

If and when it started to seem GOG might not be around anymore, I'd start thinking of keeping a secondary backup of my games. That's what I did with e.g. my DotEmu game installers when the store broke the news that they are closing down; I had the games downloaded already, only had to make sure I kept them somewhere else too as I couldn't download them from DotEmu anymore.
The people who share the (pirated) stuff online are mostly people like you and me. Sometimes they also decide to move on with their lives and stop sharing, and it becomes increasingly difficult or impossible to find online the stuff you happen to be looking for, and thought previously will always remain online for easy access.

So when 10 years from now you think about retrying some good GOG game that you used to have, don't come knocking on my door, I will not share them. :) They are just for my personal use and my personal archive.

As for the "pirate sites", to me it appears they have indeed become scarce. Yeah, it used to be that you just launch Napster to get a piece of music, or head to PirateBay for a movie or a game... but now both are offline. Maybe there are some replacements for both but they seem to be becoming increasingly difficult to find because RIAA/MPAA/whatever are constantly hunting them down, and law firms are happily tracking people downloading and sharing pirated stuff, and sending "pay us 5000 euros, or we sue your ass" letters left and right..

Plus, it is not a big secret that many bad people also try to pass you malware with the "free" pirated stuff. What is the best way to get people to install malware on their computer? Offer them something they want for free, and embed the malware into it. So yeah, I trust a GOG game installer I downloaded from GOG servers much more than a pirated copy downloaded from a pirate site. (Before you claim otherwise, there are lots of confirmed cases of pirated torrent stuff containing malware deliberately added there.)

So to me it appears that the pirating option is becoming harder and riskier every year, not easier.

If the industry ends up in such a sorry state that GOG has to give up the ghost and artificial scarcity gets in the way of my gaming, I'm sure I can find other things in my life that are more deserving of my attention. I can check hashes ;-)

So basically your point is just that you don't care (enough) if you lost access to the games you have bought from GOG over the years.

That is totally fine. I myself am not "hoarding" e.g. DVD movies or books (electronic or real) because I simply don't care about them. Or stamps. Or a butterfly collection. Or celebrity autographs (unless they'd be worth lots of money).

And that's fine too, yet I don't go to e.g. some stamp collector forum telling them how I am better than them because I don't "hoard" stamps. :)

I buy games from GOG because I like to have (=play) them, also in the future. Hence, to me it would sound just illogical I wouldn't do anything at all to secure I can keep playing the stuff I have paid good money for. Your mileage may vary.

There are lots of interests that not all people share. For instance, I knew a guy who seemed to be going to (rock) concerts constantly, paying lots of money so that he could secure tickets to Metallica or whatever. I personally never could understand why he would spend lots of time and money for stupid concerts, but that's just me. You just lose your hearing in concerts, and Metallica sucks anyway.

Where do you get the "original", unaltered checksum? Is there some online archive of SHA-512 checksums of all games and software ever released on all stores, across all released versions? Or do you "hoard" such checksums yourself? :)

You own it and any extras that come with it, but if you didn't DL it or DLd a new version and wanted/needed an older one you'd be out of luck if gog ever shut down(temp or longer)....well you could always use the multitude of torrents online & many would be likely be ok with it on the forums if you bought the game here already.

As always, backup backup backup...and in more than one place if you can spare the space.

(And also backup multiple versions if you need older ones)

BTW welcome to the forums. :)

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=======Steam cracks would prove you a bit wrong on that figure/number. ;)

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This is good advice in general for users here.

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I believe staffers said in another thread that is ok if no one else has access to the files outside your own home/etc.

This is total BS.....most verified torrents aren't malware ridden and are verified by other users & can be scanned before/after installing with AV programs.

As for your examples of such happening, it's likely dumb people using direct DL sites and shady torrents without scanning the files after DLing them.

For commonly available files, hashes tend to be commonly available, yes. Often you can just look up a file by its hash and find results from virus scanners, for example: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/4ac00c798d9ef6a394a0442607e0961de75bc6abf8fa36dbdea381eb0e93a0ab/detection