GOG and itch’s approach to preservation is always gonna be limited by legality, you can’t keep a game on your platform if the publisher requests its delisting; ofc piracy isn’t constrained by this, so it’s inherently better at preservation

at least, since the games on there don’t have DRM, once you have them you keep them (and with GOG, you can also download offline installers that you can reuse on any computer you want). they make piracy (and therefore preservation) way easier in that way, because pirates don’t even need to repack the game!

Delisted just means it's no longer for sale, not that you can't download it or play it.

Not having DRM is better for piracy. So in a way they're helping "true preservation" more than other platforms that allow DRM.

It’s DRM free. Just practice good backups man. No need to jump to piracy.

GoG is very much about the marketing of game preservation. That said, to my knowledge, they (like Steam) don't remove it from your account. Just from the store. So if you bought it, you can still play it.

GoG is a bit better in that their DRM model only requires you to authenticate to download, not reinstall. So you can theoretically archive all of your purchases if you have way more storage than you should. But it also is horrible at surfacing when an installer has an update so... mostly this is only viable for truly dead games.

I like GoG a lot as a platform but it has always rubbed me wrong that they pretend they are focused on game preservation. But that also might be because I am old enough to remember The French Monk incident.

Lol, should they just keep the games up? See if any blood hungry lawyers notice? (Piracy is probably the best way to preserve though, I will agree on that.)