I don't have the time to integrate those solutions myself. I'm aware that I could make most of my collection work on Linux with something like Wine or Proton. I'm just better served focusing on my career than doing that. And when I'm not working, the time I have to dedicate to IT, I prefer spend learning useful things for my career or working on projects that motivate me, not spending time making my games work.

As far as I'm aware, nobody is working on making it dead simple to run. They make amazing tools that does 80% of the heavy lifting, but the remaining 20% is left to the end user. I'm used to it, I work in software. However, when it comes to installing my games, I like it to just work. I don't need this to be a second job.

Also, in the theoretical scenario I'm talking about, it wouldn't be to maintain Galaxy. If I'd pay maintenance money, it would be to work on offline installers.

Right, but you're still talking about breaking EOL OSes (I believe you were talking about Windows XP). My point is that those OSes are getting harder and harder to run on changing hardware and its a matter of time before they are unusable.

Its much worse when the software won't run on newer OSes. That's when you are in trouble.

I think there should be a reasonable window period of free updates after a game is released. However, if you expect that period to be decades, I think they might have to charge you more for your games.

Isn't Steam making money from things like mods at this point essentially ripping off content creators? They can probably afford to keep updating their catalog indefinitely.

I don't like getting pirated copies off the internet. Legalities and ethics aside, I work in software and I like to keep my computers as pristine as I can. I don't run things that don't come from legit sources on them. I'm extremely careful with this.

Otherwise, that's how you get hacked, get a data breach and make the papers.

I'm suggesting a viable business model where a store holding your games provides actual support for the games and doesn't collapse under its own weight over time.

Yeah that's why I edited my comment, figured the other stuff I said was unnecessary and heat of the moment.

Basically what I was trying to communicate is that if the most passionate about DRM-free keep finding themselves more and more frustrated with GOG, maybe splitting your (speaking to the "most passionate") time between here (basically "fighting" for DRM-free here) and a place dedicated to DRM-free in general isn't a bad idea. Or maybe you already do that. If such a place doesn't already exist (which it may well given what you said about "one of the only places"), consider creating it, and those who are as passionate as you about DRM-free will follow to it (especially if it ends up promoted here).

For consideration: if GOG goes under, where do you go? Where's the "backup" place to congregate?

In fact if such a discussion board, site, or whatever (not Zoom discord since you mentioned disliking that format) - some place dedicated to discussing DRM-free - already exists, as you seem to have suggested, consider creating a dedicated thread for it here to promote it.

you go to reddit for the drm free alternative store suggestions; then you find a discord server for that service if reddit doesn't already have the best congregation point.

At the moment Itch IO is looking like the best mainstream alternative DRM free place; i'm sure there's plenty of game discords from their titles; i'd go there and work backwards to find an Itch IO community discord channel.

Say https://itch.io/t/158542/join-the-itchio-discord is probably where you'd end up; though I can't say if it's directly controlled by Itch IO or not (which would be bad from a censorship point of view).

Itch is not fully DRM-free, nor do they even discourage DRM. They have a DRM-free tag, but they don't define it in any way other than what the acryonym stands for and I'm not sure how reliable it is. I don't know of any way to find out from a particular game page if a game is DRM-free unless the developer mentions it, which they almost never do from the pages I've looked at (mostly from the Ukraine bundle, which claimed to be all DRM-free). If there was an issue they would almost certainly leave it to the developer's decision if you get a refund or not. Additionally, they have so much low quality stuff that it is hard to browse the store (IMO, the small but generally high quality catalog is a big advantage of GOG and personally I'm happy with the rate of releases here). They do at least have regular forums, not only discord (based on a quick look I'm not sure they are moderated any better than GOG forums :( ).

Looking at the other options (where at least some DRM-free games are available without using a client):

Humble Bundle seems to be mostly selling keys these days (including a few GOG keys), although they also have an app now and won't even show you what is in the Humble Trove outside the app so I'm not sure how much longer it will be possible to download anything without the app. Very few developers keep games up to date there, much worse than on GOG. I also haven't seen them define what DRM-free means to them anywhere. I don't think they have any kind of forum.

FireFlower Games is entirely DRM-free and has a short discussion of what that means but don't go into the details that have caused trouble here. It is run by one person (I'm guessing not full time) and it looks like they have about 200 items, not all games. They do have a regular forum but it looks like there have been no posts so far this year.

Zoom Platform is fully DRM-free, at least for now, although they don't care about it enough to mention DRM on their about page and don't go into any detail about what that means (and they tell publishers they have a wrapper that makes it easy to publish there, no mention of removing online gated content). What they are really passionate about is cross-media branding. Do you feel a lack of cross-media branding in your life? I sure don't. They are trying to copy CD Projekt and really want to be a developer. They currently have 425 games listed according to their home page (which doesn't work at all without javascript enabled). They only have discord.

I'm not aware of any others. Playism used to have a store (that claimed to be 100% DRM-free but still had some games that were only Seam keys) but that is gone.

IMO, GOG is still at least as good as the others when it comes to DRM-free (with the possible exception of FireFlower, which doesn't have many games I'm interested in). And that is before considering the refund policy, which is better on GOG than any other game store I've seen. If Zoom Platform has any kind of refund policy I can't find it and their terms of service don't even officially allow a backup copy (GOG's user agreement leaves that entirely up to the indivdual game's EULA). I wish GOG was more honest about the DRM-free exceptions, but unfortunately corporate PR is going to coporate PR. It seems this announcement was just to announce the new annotations, which should have been there years ago but are good to see.

In terms of profit, GOG is a store and stores shouldn't be all that profitable. If they are, it means they are ripping of the people who make the stuff they sell (possibly also customers; of course, I'd also say that wildly profitable products of any kind are also ripping people off, but at least it is more reasonable for developers to earn a somewhat larger profit if the game is popular). It can also provide more value than is obvious, such as CDPR paying Steam 12% for CP2077 sales there vs their usual 30% (I think?), at least some of which might have been due to having a credible threat of not listing on Steam at all. Although if Epic or Microsoft offers them a sufficiently large wad of cash they might decide they really don't need to have a store.

The previous profits and current losses are more even in terms of cash flow because money spent on "Galaxy 2.0" development wasn't considered spent until the release and is now applied according to some formula that you can find in the CD Projekt financial reports. Galaxy is connected to GWENT and the managing director responsible for Galaxy is also in charge of GWENT (that employs about 20% of CD Projekt developers from investor presentations).

dlsite has a tag for DRMed games. Glad to see gog is considering being a store that does what all the other non-fully-drm-free (like gog itself) stores do.

Now can we stop associating gog with DRM-free like they invented it or something? Why don't we stop asking for "GOG versions" on steam and instead ask for itch or something like that? For some reason we have this false equivalency with gog that puts it above all the others that have the same basic schtick at this point. At least the others aren't partnering with yet another client producer. GOG is not the ear to the ground rich uncle with connections that they want us to think they are. They are not family, they can't even define DRM. Maybe we'd get more drm-free games if we stopped using GOG as the suggestion? It's not like GOG doesn't have a horrible rep with developers at this point for a multitude of reasons. GOG is just a bunch of suits with no idea what they're doing, and you gotta wonder if they even know their damn product.

GOG has provided some additional information in various forum posts, although possibly Zoom Platform has as well and I can't see it do to not signing up with discord. However, their post on twitter in response to this news post would have been an excellent place to clarify, which they didn't do. It's just as corporate PR with less actual information.

While I don't really follow such things, it seems to me that CD Projekt has done a fair amount of cross media stuff, although many developers have done that kind of thing. The part about starting a DRM-free store, porting old games to new systems, and also developing games does sound a lot like one particular company. I'm not saying it is bad that they are copying CD Projekt, just that they are likely to be subject to the same financial pressures as time goes on and could easily make worse choices when it comes to DRM.

I remembered one more, DLsite [edit: ninja'd]. While mostly focused on Japan they have some English (and Korean and Chinese) language DRM-free games and have at least some ways to buy from outside Japan. They also have games with DRM and it seems like they mention each time that is the case, although I can't find any statements about DRM other than the descriptions of particular DRM linked from product pages. I don't think they have forums, although they have comments on individual products and the ability for users to create guides. Also, the games are not usually updated and may only work on the OS versions they were released for.

That also reminds me that another oddity of itch is the lack of reviews on games unless the developer has enabled comments. You can review a game but only the developer and people who have followed you individually will see that review (you can see the average rating under "more information").

The GOG website does partially work without javascript, only screenshots and trailers seem to not work when I tried it (but I didn't try to actually buy anything, I'm fairly sure that wouldn't work; I didn't look at reviews either, I think that also wouldn't work). Not a big deal but since I have javascript off by default I prefer to see something in that case (Zoom Plaform just gives a blank page).

Don't forget there was a recent controversy here that GOG was removing relevant game reviews for "trolling" or something like that. dlsite also censors reviews, but these platforms are quite open about it, unlike gog.

Companies manage to the market, and markets are ruthless today, and have been for quite some time. If you don't you're going to find it difficult to make ends meet. For me it comes down to pushing back against the mass acceptance of predatory corporate behavior, and doing that would require a significant investment of resources that would not be likely to result in short term dividends. If a consumer movement were to incentivize ethical corporate behavior, I think it would have an impact on smaller, independent companies run by people who care about what they do.

That's how I envision it, and I think it's too late for GOG. Now that they're in bed with EGS, the die is pretty much cast.

OK, 447 comments is definitely too much for me to read, but I'd like to say that I'm really happy that GOG made the commitment. It's bad time for gaming and DRM-Free policy, there are much more problems and dangers for freedom today, policy of many publishers is incompatible with GOG's policy and that's the reason I'll support GOG – even if not everything here is perfect, they're still on my side.

I think the problem is that corporations are fundamentally unethical. Under capitalism unethical behavior is encouraged, but under corporate capitalism, we have government structures in place that make ethical behavior illegal: fiduciary responsibility. In this system, we're the product, not the things we're buying.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, (or $1.49 while it's on sale).

I don't think 'corporations are fundamentally unethical', by definition, but they are in general indifferent to ethical considerations - ethics are not their priority, that's not why they are there. However, I think that consumers that care about ethics can effectively force corporations to also care about ethics, but making their financial success contingent on meeting certain ethical standards. Which is why our only hope is to boycott GOG and make it clear that our continued patronage is contingent on the store upholding its stated values.

You are right though, that the problems at GOG/CDPR started when they sold out and went public. Because at that point their priorities changed overnight to satisfying shareholders, rather than satisfying customers or adhering to their founding principles.

This is why I think there is a better chance long-term with Zoom Platform, because they are independent and have not sold out. Of course, people will say: "well, but what if they go down the same road, sell out and go corporate in the future?". They might. I don't know for sure that it won't happen - there can never be any guarantees about what might happen in the future to any business we choose to deal with. But, it is not a foreordained, foregone conclusion that they will sell out. There is infinitely more chance that an independent, privately-owned business will stay independent, than one that has already sold out, so that's the one that will continue to get my 'vote' (unless I see things change at GOG).

No. DRM-free doesn't mean different things to different people. DRM is "Digital-Rights-Management" and means, restrictive parts of a license agreement are digitally enforced.

The other - namely binding a feature of the product to an external resource - is subject to planned obsolescence. It is not a license issue, but an issue of level of service. A service, that can be terminated at any given moment.

The right thing to do is thus threefold:

A) The end user license agreement must be drawn up in such a way that it does not include any passages that restrict consumers' rights to use the software as they see fit, including backup copies and installation on multiple machines within the same family or household at the same time.

B) No part of the software provided may include code suitable to observe, report, or restrict how consumers access or use the software--AKA "DRM".

C) Whenever a product is using planned obsolescence, i.e. services like multplayer, which can be unilaterally terminated, the consumer must 1) be informed that this is the case and 2) be provided with a service level agreement that guarantees a minimum quality of service and service duration (3 years sounds reasonable) during which the provider cannot terminate the support of the features sold. Including a full refund option in case the service level agreement is broken. If a provider terminates the SLA prematurely, GOG must automatically compensate or reimburse all affected costumers--including cases of provider bankruptcy.

I am willing to accept planned obsolescence, but that door swings both ways. I want full disclosure what I am getting for my money, I want guarantees, and I want my money back if a product is sold with a feature, that is then terminated prematurely or not provided at a minimum quality.

Very few games with DRM on DLSite. That's an adult site, I know it well. Most of the games, if not practically all of them are DRM-Free in adult markets. At most, they may have an activation DRM which means you just put in a code in order to download the file, but the game itself is fully playable offline and without a client. That's no deal breaker for me.

It reflects elitism, I think, which is the worst of all the 'isms. The greatest sophism of all time, IMO, is the notion that economics requires amorality, and must eschew qualitative considerations in favor of constant growth. I'd put it a little differently than you and say we're the product as much as the things we consume -- products of cybernetics. According to Norbert Wiener, who literally wrote the book on cybernetics, human beings are goal-seeking devices. It amazes me that someone of such profound genius could be so incredibly ignorant of spirituality, but I think it reflects that genius is itself an extreme, and is fairly unbalanced, and shows that science should never be the be all/end all of human endeavor.