I’d like to get back into playing video games, but I don’t want to have to sign up for an online service like Steam or Ubisoft Connect.
I love technical sandbox games like Scrap Mechanic, especially if they have a “creative mode” that allows me to just make stuff.
I enjoy all the games I bought from GOG (3?)—in case you are wondering they are DRM free so you can keep using them forever (in theory).
But honestly I don’t get people who have a big hang-up about digital stores. Regardless of ownership/ license-ship—these are all pieces of software designed to run on specific software and WILL eventually be unplayable regardless of how they were acquired.
Unless you’re going back to platforms from the 90s or early 2000s, everything needs updates from the internet / downloads to work so even if you have a physical copy of a lot of games on a console, they’re gonna stop working eventually.
Just pay the marginal fee and enjoy. Its a low amount of money to pay for hours of entertainment in like 99% of the cases.
Open source does help keep games be forward-ported and playable, but I can think of at least a couple of open-source games that I remember playing that I don’t see any more.
Nighthawk, an open-source [Paradroid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradroid1 clone, was in Red Hat Linux 5.2, IIRC, but seems to have fallen out of Linux distros at some point.
Lacewing, an Asteroids-genre game done by Linley Henzell, the guy who did Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, was definitely ported to Linux at some point, as I remember running it, but I haven’t seen it in distros for a long time. A successor game he made, Overgod, does appear to be in current Debian.