GOG: the closest thing to owning your games, and where it stops

This is the promise under test, from the section of GOG's own About page headed "Owning the things you buy", on a page whose banner reads "We make games last forever". Read it closely, because it is more careful than its heading: locked out, asked to prove. Those are access words. The heading says own; the sentence under it promises something narrower, and the rest of this page is about the gap.

The same grant as every other page in this report: personal, and stoppable. GOG's own plain-English summary beside the clause says it without the parenthesis: "This right can be suspended or stopped by us in some situations." The store that markets ownership names the thing it sells a licence, in the first operative clause of its agreement.

One sentence closes resale, closes gifting your library, and closes inheritance. The agreement never mentions death; this is the clause an estate would meet. To be precise about what it does not say: buying a new game as a gift through GOG's own checkout is expressly allowed elsewhere (11.1). What cannot move is anything that is already yours.

Credit first: this is the narrowest termination clause in this report. It requires a material breach, defines the term as a serious breach that could cause significant harm, and commits GOG to reasonable steps to explain itself. Valve can cancel with no fault on your part at all; GOG cannot. And still, read what the right reaches when it fires: not just GOG services. GOG content. The games.

The sentence most people assume GOG does not have. It does, in the Code of Conduct the User Agreement makes you accept (3.3 there makes your access subject to it). The qualifier is quoted with it: this is reserved for the most severe cases, and we found no documented case of GOG actually taking a paid library this way. But the difference between GOG and the others on this point is a difference of record, not of contract.

This is the only time "DRM-free" appears anywhere in GOG's User Agreement, and it is in the wrong column. The agreement is laid out as binding text with a plain-English summary beside it, and its own preamble rules the summaries out: "However, please be aware that the full text wording is what is important/binding legally." The thing GOG is famous for, the thing its whole identity stands on, is not a term of the contract. It is a practice, described in the margin.

No other company in this report promises anything like this: if GOG dies, you get notice and a window to take everything with you. It is a genuinely consumer-protective clause and it deserves the credit. It also deserves a careful reading: "we will try" and "you should be able to" are best-efforts words, and the clause covers a permanent shutdown, not a delisting and not a ban. The strongest promise in the agreement is still written softly.

This is the practice that earned the reputation, stated while losing two games it clearly wanted to keep. The same post announces a policy: "Going forward, even if a game is no longer available for sale on GOG, as part of the GOG Preservation Program, it will continue to be maintained and updated by us". Delisted games staying playable, in your library, with installers you can save: that is real, and none of the stores we indict here comes close (itch.io, the other store we like here, writes a survive-delisting licence of its own). What it is not, on GOG, is a contract term. A news post binds the next delisting exactly as much as the next management decides it does.

The day before, GOG posted "if only there was a storefront that actually lets you own your games............", and readers answered by quoting section 2.1 of its own agreement back at it. This is the clarification, and it concedes the whole distinction this page draws: asked what "own" meant, GOG did not say title, or the account, or the licence. It said the files. That is the honest version of the DRM-free promise, in GOG's own words, and it is exactly as far as the promise goes.