DRM has always been anti-customer use. Its never really been about the pirates.

DRM has always been about combat piracy. What has been anticonsumer is the consequence of the DRM systems. That's the reason why they are considerer in fact (as a consensum) not really a total solution against piracy. More harming to the legit user than to the non legit one.

Anyway, at least in modern AAA titles the great industry considers the specific DRM game system amortized once the game passed the first great sales, or launching boom spike, more or less. Later they could clean the game if they wanted. But they never want to do it. They are happy in that way.

From the 1980s and early 1990s, there were games which utilized codewheels, and reading things from the game manual.
Those systems are anti-piracy, without being DRM.
This is because those systems were designed from the outset to be a part of the games themselves, and were not an externally applied system, manufactured by a third party, solely designed to restrict access to the game's files and/or game content.

One Batman game from the Arkham series had it so that in pirated copies Batman's cape glide/etc didn't work right....does that count as an anti-piracy mechanic?

No my argument is, having multiplayer requiring DRM / online activation is nothing new, and, Gog not caring about optional content in SP is also nothing new with stuff either being removed from Gog version or requiring extra steps to obtain. So it's not really a case of Gog eroding their views on DRMs but more of some peoples just noticing it today.

Also

In Serious Sam 3 BFE
there the mechanics worked
like if anyone was found playing the game had an pirated version a boss monster woud be summoned chasing the Pirate nonstop

Yeah, such things have likely been in a number of more recent games, I am guessing.

The locked cosmetics in Cyberpunk are new and represent a new low with CDPR's own games. They have said they are planning a MP version with microtransactions. The deal with Epic is new. The locked content in Non Man's Sky was relatively new, before the developer fixed it. They just recently took down FCKDRM.com. Obviously, the issue with Devotion is new.

So, I disagree with you. There is a clear pattern of continual erosion of GOG's core pricniples.

What i dont get
is why gog is getting away with it in terms of legal sense
If a company have broadcasted they are drm free
and even does so today
but still implement drm or backpaddles on it
this is in essence false advertising
and its really suprising not a single court in Europe or anyone else have started a case on this issue

or maybe i shoudt be so suprised
generally courts arent on the consumers side
at least thats my impression
and it often takes money or berucracy to get a case going.

Courts don't start cases. You need someone to sue GOG for false advertising first. Someone with enough money to fight such a law-suit through multiple instances. GOG was careful enough not to promise 100% DRM-free anymore. They just say, that GOG is the home of curated DRM-free games. Promising "a selection of DRM-free games". ... Which they do. A selection of the games on GOG is still DRM-free.

Moreover they promise: "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." ... which seems to promise completely DRM-free gaming, right? No, it doesn't. It shows what their definition of 'DRM-free' is in legalese:
1. you won't be locked out of titles you paid for. - Which means DRM on Gwent is OK and also extra content (DLCs) and so on can be locked behind DRM. You still don't get locked out of the base game you paid for. So from a legalese standpoint GOG is in the clear.
2. you won't be constantly asked to prove you own the games - which leaves the door open for occasionally asking you to prove you own the game. As long as it isn't constantly. ... I.e. if you read this with a legal goggle, all this sentence does is promise not to use always-online DRM.

Nowhere does GOG promise nowadays not to use online-registration or to keep all parts of all games DRM-free. They have carefully reworded their 'about us' page towards becoming a DRM-agnostic platform. That makes suing them very difficult.

The only thing that might still be seen as false advertising is the promise, that Galaxy is optional. Which is still there on the 'about us' page. However, even there they removed the '100%'. They don't promise anymore that Galaxy will always be 100% optional. So it's a grey area. They still call it optional, but for many multiplayer-games and some single-player content it isn't. So if you have the funds and time to sue them over false advertising, this might be an angle. But expect a long fight.


There are some other things they promise that look like false promises, because they imply a quality of service that just isn't true. But if you look closely at the wording, everything is so vague that it won't be persecutable in front of a court.

They promise "Stellar support" ... implies good support. But actually means that it is written in the stars, when, how and whether your support tickets will be taken care of.

They state that their support staff is working round the clock. Good luck proving that they don't. Maybe their desks are placed around a clock? So that when they actually do something, they are working around a clock. ;-)

They promise direct contact with the GOG team and that they will get back to you if you contact them. But they don't say when. They don't even promise quick responses. Just that they'll get back to you eventually.

And so on. Their lawyers did a good job re-wording their promises in a way so that they don't actually mean anything.

Is suing the only way though?
I got the impresssion that in some cases like human rights court or cases like the Holocoust under world war 2 (the nurnberg trials)
it wasnt always about suing people or organizations
or the cases werent driven by Monetary gains but rather the principle of certain laws
offcourse some of the victims did get compensations later
but there were also instances where there were no compensations to be given to anyone because the line of the family that were the victims didnt exist any longer.

Courts starting cases was a wrong way of prhasing it
i meant people tied to the legal system

Well
Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines the right to property as follows: (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his or her property.

One can argue that always online drm has the potential to deprive somone of his or her property.
and if we stretch this a bit it coud be applied to normal drm as well the day support for this measuere stops, making it impossible to play the game
And a game can be said to be a Property.

Of course im not an legal expert
but it doesnt say Property has to be land or a house

Property is any item that a person or a business has legal title over. Property can be tangible items, such as houses, cars, or appliances, or it can refer to intangible items that carry the promise of future worth, such as stock and bond certificates.

1. a thing or things belonging to someone; possessions collectively.

2.an attribute, quality, or characteristic of something.

Im not going to do something like that either
i dont have the money either
and im only one person so taking it up at court here woud probably just be futile

One issue is that relevant parts of the blockchain data can (intentionally of course to make it harder to get around the DRM) be distributed widely (*) which may make the preservation of the blockchain near impossible in practice.

(*) For example every instance only has a small randomized part of the respective critical blockchain part. It is given this data by the act of 'buying' ~= transferring some blockchain coins to some specified blockchain address. To reduce the willingness to share this data it is used for 'mining' which generates coins (not necessarily the same kind of coin as is used for buying) for those who have this data. Those coins would be necessary to run the game but can also be bought or sold on some exchange.

Disclaimer: I dont know if any of this is properly doable but as of now I see no hard obstacles preventing such a scheme.

They may have 'gotten away' with some things but they currently face at least two issues. One is that some Polish consumer protection office or sth has threatened CDPR due to Cyberpunks buggy state or sth (no link).

The other is that investors didnt like being deceived and are suing in US: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/cdpr_faces_4_lawsuits_from_investors

Thanks for the info
i thougth the the bugs issue was dropped due to the refunds
i didnt know that was still going on

The investor one is interesting but not reallly any benifit for the consumer directly allthough it can have inderect impact
wich may be positive