Just a quick reminder that discs that you burn yourself at home do degrade pretty quickly, much faster than pressed discs. I personally have had burned discs that failed after approx. 6 years. It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs. Even pressed discs can fail after 20 years if you are unlucky.
Using 2 big HDDs (2 for redundancy) full of your installers might be safer in the long run and also easier to manage and backup.
That’s why I print out all my downloaded games
I hope you also laminate them for longevity.
I laminate my punch cards for longevity. Wouldn’t want them breaking down.
I prefer to cut archival cards from 0.7mm 316 stainless steel sheet 👍
Clay tablets have been demonstrated to last much longer than paper or metal
I suspect corrosion-resistant steel alloys haven’t been around long enough to prove themselves in that regard XD
Corrosion-resistent is not the same as non-corrosive.
I suppose gold as a noble metal would be stable over a long period, as it’s non-reactive. But certain kinds of acids can still dissolve it, unlike ceramic
I can already see them rusting down by the harbour. Meanwhile people still find bits of ceramics left from ages last on the beaches.
So if you bury your clay tablets in a treasure chest it should be good.
Nonsense. I got some high quality copper from a merchant I fully trust and I bet this will last forever.
Was his name Ea? His name isn’t known today for being engraved in copper…
Sure, but what if there’s a fire!? My favorite game is Ocarina of Time. I don’t want to risk losing it, so I memorized the binary digits that comprise the code. Can’t be too careful!
Hope you keep your brain safe. Even then illness can easily rob you of those memories.
Fully agree. This is why I’ve made multiple children. Then I train them on the binary digits the way other parents teach shapes, numbers, and the ABCs. Can’t be too careful, it’s best to have multiple backups
The trick is to name your children after the save file
The special ones, yes
I eat those to gain their power.
You should really move to microfilm. It saves so much space!
It just doesn’t smell the same
Typing them back in after the apocalypse will take a while, but you’ll be able to impress all the other wasteland mutants with a working copy of Half Life Alyx.
Use M-Disc media. It’s said to last 1000 years. It’s expensive and very slow to rip at the suggested 4x speed.
I’ve been very satisfied with them, and you just need a regular Blu-Ray drive.
Cheapest solution is an HDD + one more for backups. M-Discs for 15-17€ per 100GB are for the games you wanna take to your grave.
I mean they are games that i no longer have to worry about data corruption or loss. Like ever. And i can Will these to family & friends. The cost is easily worth that!
Yeah, normal burners are more like printers, where the write laser activates or deactivates a pigment which then either reflects or absorbs the read laser to represent 0/1. But that pigment can degrade over time, turning 1s into 0s.
M-discs are instead etched and iirc use constructive and destructive interference so the reader (which is the same reader as normal discs, just the writer needs to specifically support M-disc) reads the 0/1. It will also degrade over time, but since it’s a thicker layer of difference, it will last significantly longer than a thin layer of pigment. And I bet that special m-disc specific readers could be made to read it again after it degrades to the point where the interference technique stops working, since an image could still show where the high and low points are, even if the waves don’t align perfectly anymore.
In practice, I’ve found that the drive was way easier to find than the media for m-disc. Like most optical disc writers these days seem to support it but the discs are expensive af compared to non m-disc.
Though when I was going through my old burnt CDs and DVDs, I was surprised at how well they were holding up. I was expecting at least some read errors by now but everything has been fine so far.
Well, other than the data quality lol. Not like the readability of the file but stuff that took days to download back then would download today in seconds and a good monitor I got well after my early files was only 720p for its resolution. The data I prized as a youth is kinda sad today.
blu ray in this economy?
Verbatim Datalife HTL BD-R discs are supposedly made in a similar technology (some folk on r/datahoarder think they’re exactly the same but idk). At the very least they won’t have the same problem as DVDs (no organic dye) and they actually work out cheaper than half decent HDDs. I can get 25GBx50 cake for £30. I’ve only started burning them a year or two ago so time will tell if I lose my data :x.
What about Verbatim AZO? I’ve heard good stuff about those, and they’re not expensive.
Also, as far as CDs go, I’ve found that an old degraded player which doesn’t read burned discs anymore but plays pressed discs will still play burned AZO discs just fine.
You need an M-DISC BluRay drive.
And reminder that solid state drives (including thumb drives) can lose data after a couple years if they are not plugged in from time to time
It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs.
Yep. I got some no-name DVDs at Kaufland as they were just EUR 1 for a 10-pack. They started having read issues after just 4 years.
Also, they easily peel apart with just fingers and no effort.Edit:
Packaging:
Media ID: MBI 01RG40The worst case I experienced was a disc that disintegrated after a couple years. It got an actual extra hole in it, in a way that looked like somebody spilled acid on it and the acid burned right through the disc. In reality it just lay in my drawer.
In your acid draw?
Big Disc propaganda
Big Disc Energy
From what I recall, only self-burnt CD’s and DVD’s degrade quickly, while self-burnt blu-rays last significantly longer, even if not m-discs.
Apparently blu-rays are even worse than other discs. This is from the abstract of an accelerated ageing study (sadly I don’t have access to the whole paper):
Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016/html
Yep! Quote from digitalfaq
The BD-R write-once type is based on a completely new concept for the recording layer utilizing a two-layer structure composed of silicon (Si) and copper alloy (Cu) inorganic materials. When heated by the recording laser beam, these melt and the Si and Cu alloy become a composite forming recording marks. Because the material is inorganic, it is not affected by light, thus realizing a disc with outstandingly high reliability in terms of archivability.
And another quote from the same source
Write-once recordable DVD-R/DVD+R media (as well as CD-R media) all uses synthetic organic based dyes – usually azoic dyes (metallized azo chelates or azo metal chelate). Some of them are based on other synthetic organics, such as cyanine, dipyrrometheme or oxonol.
Your source is just a forum quoting manufacturer marketing texts.
In an accelerated ageing study blu-ray performed worse than other discs:
Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016/html
Plus you can store more games on each one. Don’t they cost quite a bit per disc though?
You can get a 50 pack of Verbatim’s standard BD-R for ~$40 AUD, or their premium Datalifeplus discs for ~$100 AUD. I’ve used both of these discs, and I’ve run burn quality tests and they’re both great. This is just talking about single layer discs, so 25GB per disc. 50GB discs are reasonably priced, 100GB and 128GB start getting a bit rich.
Oh yeah, its the very long life ones I was thinking of that cost a lot. If there are more regular ones at lower prices with still a moderate lifespan then that probably makes more sense.
Note: Don’t use SSDs for this either. They can easily corrupt and lose information if not powered on for as little as a year, in some cases.
yup. God knows how many Dreamcast games I’ve had to toss and reburn over the years.
Try M-Disc, it’s supposed to be as good as microfilm for archival.
Yeah a HDD with another for periodic backups would be a lot more reliable.
This is the message we need to hear. The bread and butter. I get so tired of people nitpicking GOG and Mozilla over every relatively minor thing when they are some of the only people trying to hold back the deluge of bullshit.
Agreed. Someone complained Firefox moved to updates every few days or something.
They had no clue Firefox updates like all the time.
Do they? Maybe for minor releases but I’m pretty sure Firefox is currently doing major releases every 4 weeks and starting from September they’re going to do it byweekly. Personally I don’t see what the big deal is but I can absolutely see someone on the fediverse being outraged by the idea of a more frequent release schedule.
Ran into someone complaining about the same with Edge and updates going to every 4 weeks. Showed them the release log where they have been releasing one to two times a week - minor updates but still updates that require the browser to be restarted but that the person never noticed.
byweekly I think you mean semi-weekly. Bi-weekly is twice per week
Also it means every 2 weeks. Which is the case here.
Semi-weekly however ONLY means twice per week.
Also it means every 2 weeks
Only for people that can’t speak English
https://writingexplained.org/bi-weekly-vs-semi-weekly
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/semiweekly
https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/bi-vs-semi-weeklymonthlyannually/
You are pedantic-ing and getting it backwards.
Every fortnight
Mozilla is the best browser to ever exist and I will die on this hill.
You mean Firefox? Or is Mozilla the actual core or something? I thought they were just a company or a foundation or whatever
Yea, they mean Firefox. Mozilla is the non-profit foundation, along with its subsidiary company by the same name, that makes it along with other open-source software.
GOG trying to drum up positive pr after that Nazi symbol newsletter.
Yeah, that was a major WTF moment
Hey, watch you don’t criticize gamers’ favourite Nazi bar.
You guys really trying to make an elephant out of a gnat.
sorry I like to remind people not to get cozy rooting for for-profit corporations that’ve shown some ick recently. took as much effort to remind as it did for the post, but whatever constitutes “elephant” in your book.
Didn’t they instantly flag that? It was for some slavic game thing and all of those symbols are rooted in cultures long gone that nazis appropriated.
The symbol alone was OK, but they doubled it to read SS, and they didn’t send it to Germany; which means it was 100% intentional and not just a little oopsie.
That’s because the German team flagged it.
I don’t think it’s a good look but to decry they’re nazis for an email showing runic alphabet and slavic symbols doesn’t exactly trigger me too hard. It really sounds like someone fucked up.
People out there still buying Bayer products and they genuinely were part of the Holocaust, a huge part of it. Ford, Volkswagen, etc.
There’s a world where someone uses a kolovrat or a sigel without intending to relate them to the Nazis. There is not a world where they use both a kolovrat and two sigels in a row and don’t know what it means. Maybe someone at GOG didn’t catch on, but the devs knew what was up.
So we think the entire dev team, marketing team and anyone else involved had a whole meeting and plan to do this? What’s the end goal?
Hanlon’s Razor dude. Going to need more for me to decry the Nazi label onto someone.
Amazing bad faith response. Bravo.
no goal beyond having a laugh at triggering people with nazi symbols; same as NYT did with their Nazi symbol crossword.
The fact the apology didn’t make an effort to say something like “those responsible have been sacked” and instead said something like “nazis shouldn’t have all the Nordic symbols” told me all I needed to know about their workplace environment and the types that work there. no bueno for me.
Not saying I’m boycotting them, because ethical consumerism is near impossible, but I’m not going to rally behind them or applaud them for anything like they’re to be championed sans asterisk.
I really doubt that’s even what happened here. I don’t think the people who run the company, any member of the marketing team or even anyone important sat down in a meeting to decide this for a fuckin laugh.
It’s probably some dumb AI, some intern or some individual fuck or just a genuine mistake. The character doesn’t even render the same on every platform. Maybe if there was more than this one event I’d be more interested but I really think this is goofy.
Especially because I know most people crying about it have definitely owned something Microsoft or IBM related and don’t even consider it.
Most people only care cause they read an article about it and are genuinely looking for any excuse to hop on their high horse and act high and mighty.
It’s silly. I bet you can get most Wolfenstein games on GOG. We gonna be mad now because that game has Nazi symbolism in it? C’mon.
No one listens to the logos of God. It’s either the pathos or the ethos; the emotional arguments or the ones that fall squarely on authority holding up what they say is true. Like, I can explain to you that everything you experience is in your brain, so all experiences must correlate with something in your neurons, so these words you’re reading on this device are actually inside you, and thus the Earth isn’t real as the Buddha and the kid that bent spoons at the Oracle’s in the Matrix explain. Cognitive dissonance is king in this world, because the rift between what we’re told is going on and what is really going on is absolutely enormous. Some game studio trying to capitalize on a demographic doesn’t perturb me. Corporations are going to corporate. What bothers me is how the sheep behave in response to such dipshit shepherds who have taken the reins of the flock. You’ve let this happen to yerselves.
Wow what a super condescending way to say absolutely nothing worthwhile.
This rune displays differently depending on what program or app you view it in. The game itself was something about a sun which is what the symbol represents.
If GOG was full Nazi I’m sure they have better ways to express it. I think it’s super pathetic and screams of pearl clutching to dive on the Nazi label and freak out. It’s also so dumb to assume the entire team is in on it like they sat down and plotted this whole scheme. Could be a stupid intern, could be overworked skeleton crew, could be AI.
Sorry you’re gonna need more than that for me to become a giant weiner about a stupid game company I could not care less about.
Also stop being such a tool.
Hey brother, I know you think you are helping the world, but you’re telling off a cop.
The symbol alone was OK
Not really
No, it was the lightning SS symbols.
I bet you will be forgotten about it in 2 days if it was Steam who send it
nah valve can eat shit too. look at that I can hate two things at once. dab on it.
To preserve “pagan” games or are we talking about another GOG?
Yeah I’m still pretty concerned about that whole event but it seems like everyone has just forgotten about it.
I could have forgiven the initial email as a rogue nazi intern but their official response being “we made sure not to send it to Germans and its on you all for seeing nazi symbols as nazi symbols” is pretty fucking problematic. Also before anyone defends them as just being pagan symbols, the ones they chose to use were both modern creations by nazi germany
For anyone who’s not up to date: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
Hey, as a “pagan” (practitioner of a Left-Hand Path centered on Lilith) myself, I’d warn you not to commit to religious intolerance conflating paganism, which includes Rodnovery, a Slavic Native Faith likely the one depicted in the The End of the Sun game, with the shitty nazi dog whistle done at the sole discretion of GOG. The devs of the game made it clear that they had absolutely nothing to do with the infamous GOG newsletter and its nazi dog whistle. We pagans have nothing to do with shitty far-right bigotry.
Sorry I should have written “pagan”. I know nazis will do anything to legitimize themselves. I just dont want to white wash GOG.
Roll my fuckin eyes.
Pull out disc with a game from 10 years ago
Installs just fine and launches
“Connecting to online services…”
“Timeout: Retry? Quit?”
Huh?
I don’t think GOG allow games like that on their platform.
If only they would post more stuff on Bluesky or even use Mastodon instead of TwitterX
(Yes, i am aware they have a bluesky profile but they post less stuff on there, it seems)
The Nazi rune company hangs out at the Nazi bar? I’m shocked.
I absolutely adore GOG for being like this, and for consistently applying pressure to publishers and other marketplace vendors alike.
I just also have A Steam Library with like 1200+ titles, and it’s measured in Terabytes. And butrot in my physical media will be non zero, in long enough timescale.
I consider my continued patronage of buying games to be my subscription costs to the platform vendors. 🤣
Bit rot is already happening to my PS2 games. MGS2 is completely dead for me now. Its a copy I’ve had since I was a kid when it came out.
The only way to be sure is to save it on a quartz matrix. Only issue is it’s read-only. Not rewritable ever. Once you etch your data into quartz that’s it.
Storage is amazing, though. All of human knowledge (so far) has already been etched into such a storage medium by the UN a few years ago. It fits in the palm of your hand.
Or… you could just follow the 3-2-1 strategy with normal drives and regular scrubs. For most purposes (including a game library) that’s way better.
But I want my game library to survive the sun’s expansion!
Let’s play a game, of how much this would cost today.
Archive multiple copies with something that has error-correcting codes. Use btrfs, zfs, par2, rar, raid-5, DVDs etc
butt rot
🥹
I’m not fixing it. 🤣🤣
GOG also has a 30 day refund policy which blows everyone else out of the water, and they’ve honored it the few times I used it
Yes! GOG is absolutely excellent! For what it’s worth, Steam Support from Valve can absolutely issue refunds past the two weeks window, and I’ve done it for me in the past if the request was justified. The inside two weeks window that everyone knows is just for a no-questions-asked refund as long as the hours count is below two played.
I’m glad to hear GOG has an even better method of handling.
Does GOG support Linux?
More like, Linux supports GOG and they don’t try to stop it.
The thing you want is the Heroic Games Launcher, you can login to your GOG/Epic/Amazon and install/launch games (using WINE/Proton) pretty much like using Steam.
It’s even available as a Flatpak so you can use it on the Steam Deck.
4 replies and all of them “yes but actually no”.
I’ve been waiting for GOG Galaxy to be Linux compatible for over a decade. When they start supporting my OS I’ll start supporting their store.
But why do you need a launcher though? Is it to play games socially or something?
I just launch from the start menu. My issue is that there aren’t enough Linux titles, but at least GOG is very good about marking Linux titles and making them searchable.
So I can keep my library of games I own in one place, install it on my OS and (ideally) maintain them (patches, mods, scripts etc).
If they really wanted to be a source of competition maybe even something like the community hub of sorts where you could download the aforementioned patches or fixes for your games but primarily for centralisation of my library in app form.
Yeah, patches and updates is probably a good use case. GOG should probably just make a command line tool for Linux modeled after something like apt, with the difference that you need to log in to access your purchases. I think many users would also appreciate a curated directory of mods.
Use heroic? It allows GOG login (amongst others), and does all that.
There’s this revolutionary new technology I guess the start menu gamers haven’t caught onto yet known as “cloud saves” which make it a lot easier to continue playing games on different devices and through uninstalls.
I bring my home directory with me across installs, but I never felt the need to continue on a year-old save. Across devices I can maybe see, if you have both a gaming PC and a Steam Deck, but I think that’s a fraction of players and I don’t think I’ll join that group any time soon.
Kind of. You can install stuff like lutris or steamdeck plugins that connect to gog and download games for you
The cover question is: do the games support Linux? And with proton, a lot of them do
What does the “Linux” filter refer to then?
https://www.gog.com/en/games/new?systems=linuxEdit: I tried with a random free game. Provided was a shell script with binary data appended to it.
Native supported Linux games. Why?
Yeah, I thought that was the question. I never considered downloader/launcher, or whatever their software does.
I’d recommend Bottles over Lutris due to the latter’s unfortunate use of LLMs/AI.
GOG does not have a Linux launcher. There were some rumblings about focusing on Linux development when there was a change of hands, but we still have to see anything coming from that.
However, GOG does host Linux builds of games where available.
No, but they support MAC now. I had a little reactionary chuckle reading that. I know the Apple arm chipsets have been really good, and most games from gog are not very demanding, its just funny to me that historically Mac has not been known for gaming and they get support before Linux. Shout out to the Heroic Launcher Team.
I just made my first purchases from GOG a few weeks ago, and did it from a Linux machine. I believe it auto-detected I’m on Linux and said “Hey, this game does not natively support Linux” right at the top of the game’s page, and even said “Hey, X games in your library dont natively support Linux” when I was at the checkout. As for the ones that did, it changed to saying “This game does support Linux” on the game’s store page.
Honestly, feels good to see this sorta stuff, but this is just each game on an individual basis, independent of GOG’s launcher.
Edit: Thankfully, throw in a smidgen of wine or proton, and it’s likely all the incompatibilities are compatible.
this won’t buy anyone a yacht, though
What if I build my own yacht out of the CDs I burned my GOG installers to?
Sounds holey
Lean into it. Hovercraft yacht
Somehow they’ll get sued over this for making the other companies look like crooks and thieves
Yes, yes, we get it. Everyone and everything everywhere is bad.
Love to see it from GOG. Now if only they had a Linux launcher akin to Steam Big Picture Mode.
They would be the dream imo
Check out Heroic Games Launcher. Launches games from Epic, Steam, and GOG. Runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. When they release their latest launcher (2019), it still had example code from the Windows Vista days. Using extremely old libraries to manage storage I believe (or at least accessing storage). So they can’t even actually develop a launcher for Windows. When I messaged then about it, they didn’t care.
Witcher 3 hard copies required activation to your GOG account before they could work. Hitman (2016) was 70% locked behind the worst DRM in human history, but they sold it on their store until they were pressured by customers not to.
And Devotion still ain’t ‘preserved’ because the CCCP hivemind told them not to have it on their site, and they obeyed instantly.
GOG can suck all the dicks with that self-righteous bullshit.
Oh shit they’re not 100% perfect
And they don’t do regional pricing. Buying a game on GOG is nearly twice as expensive in my currency compared to someone in the US or EU.
So your examples for why they’re bad are something they did a decade ago and something they did because the alternative was losing their entire Chinese market.
You’re scraping the barrel. GOG must be doing things right if this is all you can come up with.
Well there’s the Nazi emails and gen AI sale art if you want something more recent.
I’m already designing covers and checking what disc type is needed for some of my favourite games
Optical media will eventually suffer bit rot and be useless. Save them to an old HDD, SD card, or USB drive, they’ll last longer.
I already have the installers on an HDD, I just like keeping games on my shelf
I’ve been wondering if my 3.25" floppies copy of Doom from the 90s still works but I haven’t gotten around to buying a usb adapter drive to try them.
Anyone ITT saying GOG is run by Nazis because some AI or intern or something used slavic symbols on an email newsletter better not use any of the following brands:
Volkswagen, Porsche, BMW, Bayer, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, Ford, General Motors, Chanel, Fanta, Shein, Temu, Zara, H&M, Nike, Adidas, Puma, Gucci, Prada, Dior, Armani, Versace, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, McDonald’s, KFC, Tyson Foods.
If you’ve ever bought any of these brands or even used one of their products once you’re also a Nazi, you exploit humans and animals and should be blacklisted from all jobs probably even killed or something idk.
There’s probably more brands. Comment them as you see fit!
/s
Only 3, but I don’t know some of the brands so not sure if they own other stuff I do. Probably safer to assume all brands are unless proven otherwise.
Straight to the gulag for you!
Oh my GOD, they got KFC!?
slavic symbols
I’m here wondering if this quote is going to age like milk or not.
Literally impossible for it to age like milk. They can’t remove games from your library, the way every other storefront can
Going forward any gaming purchase I make will be from GOG.
Or itch.io!
