Zombie apocalypse.

I don't think they have plans of closing, but if they did they would make sure we would still be able to download our games somehow. However, I would recommend buying an external hard drive to back up all your games on.

If GOG shut down I will hold you responsible for jinxing it, make an axe out of floppy disks and find you....

Just kidding :-P

I download and back up my games as soon as I buy them. Lesson learned from a certain publicity stunt. What happens if Steam closes should be a bigger concern, though right now such a thing seems very unlikely, but you never know what the future holds.

Dude, they answer it in their FAQ, it's all over the site. There's no DRM, none, if you have a backup GOG could go down tomorrow and you could still play. It's pretty lame to demand an answer from GOG themselves when GOG has made clear all over their site and other posters have confirmed it for you.
You're not going to get a warning, the site will be down. Back up your games, all of GOG can fit on 1 single TB drive and rewriteable DVDs are dirt cheap. There's no excuse for not doing it unless you have bandwidth caps and even then.

I think that they'll give a warning if they're able to, however there are enough scenarios in which they wouldn't be able to that I keep backups of all my games. HDD are pretty inexpensive these days, and if you go with a backup provider like crashplan or backblaze, keeping the files backed up is trivial.

just buy those cheap 1tb external powered drives and backup all gog's to it, you can make duplicate, triplicate copies and even put a lock on one of those and keep it in your trusted friends house
btw in case if they close down, there isn't thing you can do :D for example take steam games
two recent games breach and crasher developers shut down without warning. Now all the users can down is ramble on it, it's bs cause crasher is multiplayer only and all its servers got shutdown
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1074
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1077

and last option is torrents, during that bad stint they made changing from beta, everyone thought it was the end and many had said the torrents will be up soon in case gog goes down
read what happened here in case you were not around that time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Old_Games

First save all your GoGs on to Amazon storage, then Google storage, do this every 5 hours.

Then save them on one HDD and give it to your friend to store as an offsite backup. Do this every 2 days.

Then save another and put it into a safe deposit box, retrieve it every week and repeat the process.

Now burn it onto DVD and CD and Blu Rays every 2 years. Also copy it onto tape media and put it into a fire proof safe.

Then invest heavily in GoG financially and send them food stock regularly (cookies and Polish vodka) this should ensure that your data is safe.

Failing that and GoG collapses you are morally entitled to download the torrents.

Well that's what I do.

Getting an external hard drive and backing up the installers, and also possibly all the extras for the games, is probably your best bet.

Then there's the more affordable option of buying USB Flash drives, which should be sufficient to store the installers to these old games, a 16 GB or 32 GB flash drive should do nicely depending how many games you own from GoG.

Both of these options, if strictly used for backing up your files, should last you a lifetime if taken well care of. Flash drives won't see the same wear and tear as a computer either so your games should be safe there, and if you use flash drives to back up your installers you could arrange them by type/alphabetical order with each drive you have, for organization.

Just out of curiosity, what all are you expecting them to do?

I would agree with others, that all we can ask for is advanced notice so that we can back up our games that we have not done so with already. I do not see them giving any form of compensation, since they did deliver what they promised on, a game purchase that is ours to back up and take care of in the long run. This is one reason I love GOG. Games here are actual purchases with real installers to back up, not a "service" or installer that still must phone home to activate.

I keep my games stored on an old secondary hard drive, and I have also burned them to a disc. This works fairly well, and if one method fails on me, I have the second one to copy over again.

Actually in the fine print of the EULA they are called 'licenses' not purchases. All that really means is if anyone is caught pirating out their game copies, Gog and the other publishers can cut you off and demand you delete your games.

I probably should have phrased that better, my apologies. I know that with all games, all we are ever purchasing is a license to run it (unless you are on Steam, then it is a subscription). However, GOG games are treated more like purchases than elsewhere. You buy it, back it up, and it is yours to keep unless yes, you do something illegal enough to have a company show up at your door and revoke it.

I guess that is what I was trying to get at. Sure it is a license, but it is still treated more like a purchase. It is the user's responsibility to care for it in the end, and other than delivering the game to us in full, I cannot imagine GOG being bound by any other obligations should they run into trouble and shut down (which I pray they never do).

Although, I would hope they at least would give an early warning. Considering they updated the community on games that had to be removed from the service in the past, I imagine they would do the same in this scenario.

In this case you could contact one of the thousands of other GOG customers worldwide and ask them if they can maybe send you a copy of the installer from their backup. Since the files are (probably) not marked and you have paid for them anyway and they do not contain any DRM, you'll be able to use them exactly as if they would have been your very own... very much different to Steam or Securom or other DRMs.

Actually I think it will be a piece of cake and a matter of hours to find all GOGs games on torrents after GOG closes. I fully trust my fellow GOGers in this regard.
Exactly that was the great change that the boss of EA or Activision (don't remember) said on this years E3 Expo, that games changed from selling a finished product to selling a service. The difference is that a services involves continuous contacts between customer and seller while selling a product is just a one-time thing. The second you download your game from GOG, you don't need GOG anymore.

But I propose that in case of an unexpected GOG shutdown (like a revolution in poland/cyprus/... and the polish president trying to limit internet usage or something else) we all meet on the unofficial GOG wiki maintained by Ubivis (gogwiki.com) and make an exchange group for backups, so nobody needs to rely on his/her own harddisk-safety.

Create a Gmail account that you do not intend to actually use for email. (or use it... but not using it keeps it orderly)

Attach each game you own from Gog to a different email and save the email as a draft.

Now all your GoG titles are safe in a cloud.

I know...

Now you wanna know what happens if Google closes.

Life has risks. Wear a helmet.

U buyed it, it is your game.. so u have to take care about your property like with any other good.
I don't see any problem there..

What the real problem at the moment is.. how do u keep your local copy of your GOG stuff up to date...
I mean in the end i'll have to download everything after some time again to be sure i got a actual backup of everything. And in my case thats 180 games and 200gb. This means unneeded traffic at the side of GOG and for myself hell a lot of work to queue everything up in my downloader.

Yeah, I fear I have that very same problem, too. I've got this nagging suspicion that I'm not immortal either ... and I wonder what happens to all my beautiful memories when I die one day. Will I get reimbursed for the loss? :(