GOG Shows You How to Burn Your Digital Games to Disc

With Sony confirming it will end PlayStation disc production by 2028, the debate over digital game ownership is louder than ever — and GOG has stepped into it with a hands-on response. The storefront posted a short tutorial on X walking players through how to physically preserve their digital PC games using GOG's own offline installers.

The process is straightforward: download the offline installer for any game you own on GOG, burn it to a disc, and it's yours to keep without needing the storefront to stay online. "You don't need a storefront's permission to play what you bought," GOG wrote in the post. It's a direct shot at the broader digital ecosystem, where your library lives or dies with the platform that sold it to you. The timing is pointed — Sony recently confirmed the PlayStation Store on PS3 and Vita will go offline next summer, meaning any purchased games not already installed on those consoles will become undownloadable.

GOG has long positioned itself as the pro-ownership alternative in PC gaming, selling DRM-free titles as its core identity. That philosophy makes this tutorial a natural fit, but it also highlights the limits of the solution. Not every game is on PC, not every publisher sells through GOG — Ubisoft's catalogue being a notable absence — and always-online games remain unplayable regardless of whether you have the installer on a disc. As one user replied to GOG's post: "You own it, you have it, but you can't play it." Microsoft, for its part, is reportedly exploring a disc-to-digital program that could let players retain access to physical purchases in a digital format, though details remain thin.

GOG's tutorial is a useful workaround for the games it covers, but it's a patch on a structural problem. Genuine digital ownership at scale likely needs legislative action — something no storefront tutorial can substitute for. Until then, blank discs and offline installers are about as good as it gets.