GOG is excellent at two issues: Bringing previous video games to fashionable PCs, and telling everybody that its video games are DRM-free so you are able to do no matter you need with them. So I used to be not terribly shocked when GOG weighed in on Sony’s choice to cease producing recreation discs in 2028 with just a little be aware reminding its followers on X that they’ll simply DIY these things if they need.
“Download the offline installer of any of your games on GOG, save it to a disc and it’s yours forever,” it wrote. “You don’t need a storefront’s permission to play what you bought.”
Not a lot to it, however there’s not a lot to say—it truly is that straightforward, so long as you will have the {hardware} for it. An terrible lot of PCs haven’t got optical drives anymore, which is perhaps a little bit of a bump in that individual highway, however to that time I’ll say two issues:
💿 If you will have even a passing curiosity in recreation preservation (or simply not shedding your stuff as a result of a platform account went up in smoke for some purpose), you most likely have an optical drive put in or an exterior mendacity round someplace
💿 You may do it with USB flash drives or exterior SSDs, though among the coolness issue will unavoidably be misplaced (plugging in a USB connection won’t ever match the Hackerman aura of inserting a disc).
As somebody who collects PC video games—and who has lived, unhappily, in a no-discs world for years now—I sympathize strongly with PlayStation house owners who know of their hearts and souls that one thing shall be misplaced when bodily media goes away. And the reality is that burning your personal discs is not the identical as having them correctly stamped, boxed, and offered by one writer or one other.
But safety in opposition to the vagaries of digital not-quite-ownership is valuable in its own right, a lesson you will hopefully never have to learn. On top of that, GOG’s installers can also be mighty convenient: Years ago I bought Baldur’s Gate 2 from GOG when it was on sale just so I wouldn’t have to get out of my chair to get the box and then sit through a five-disc install process. That’s five bucks well spent in my book.
If you’re new to the whole ‘making your own discs’ thing, at its most basic you can just download the backup installers from GOG game pages and burn them onto a disc like any other file—and it’s fine to have multiple games on a single disc. If you want to get into more advanced tricks, with things like automatic installations and multi-disc support, YouTuber Archades Games has an impressively detailed breakdown of the processes you can dive into below.