(edit: whoops, sorry, wrong thread, I thought people were arguing about this in Hitman :P)
It's okay if you're not doing a full 100% boycott, I'm not since DRM-free releases do still happen (at least for now).

Except that this ship has sailed a while back: I'd say pretty much since they started adding games that had components that could feasibly run offline, but didn't, because they were integrated into Galaxy.

I think they marketed themselves into a corner and I think that's a darn shame, because ultimately they'll still have some drm (for their own games, for some highly desirable AAA titles and for multiplayer which seems to be slowly dying in the offline world for anything that is not shared-screen and technically for achievements too, though I personally don't really care about that last one).

However, now, instead of giving us a clear message, they'll either have to be sneaky about it or go through the mental gymnastics of trying to convince us that it is not really drm.

Would have bought Blade of Darkness right away. But I am still waiting for GOG's next move on the Hitman situation. Not a cent till then.

so you don't give a shit about DRM, you just want an easy answer that you can get on with? Because I believe this entire thing was and has been about DRM, and started because of DRM. Are you saying DRM would be fine if GoG just out and said they didn't care in 24 hours? Because I'm willing to guess most of this thread would crucify you for it, and I'd be right there with them.
Thank you for the smug, arrogant, aggressive, and malignant series of attempted sarcasm. You're a hero bringing the conversation to a whole new level. dude, drop the hate boner and get to the point. I know I'm long-winded but at least I try not to just repeat the same thing over and over using a new series of self-righteous sarcasm. Just admit you're a blind purist who thinks the game Spore is a DRM because the user-created designs use a centralized server instead of file downloads like WarCraft 3. Tea did it and I think he's a fool for it, but at least he's honest he'll take the penalties of zero central multi-player or server lists and required direct file downloads over having any online require to -any- degree.

Smug is not a color that fits anyone. I recommend to everyone you make it very clear what you mean by DRM instead of this selfish and spiteful attacking GoG. The amount of people using this kind of smug while defending Steam and Epic does not help this boycott. Anyone from GoG watching that shit would be wise to just ignore you, because you are a permanently lost customer.

So, Blade of Darkness ... eh! Finally!

Now that's a game I failed to buy when it was first here and would bought it in a millisecond after release on GOG.

Even now, I would have to hold my right hand with my left to stop it from clicking buy.


But, since it's available elsewhere ... what can I say GOG ... it's your loss! Again!

I'd say if you were a complete hardliner against drm, you should have bailed on the store the moment they inserted Galaxy as a dependency for multiplayer. You can say what you will, that was a gratuitous drm move (which was okayish with most of the community, probably because most people in the drm-free crowd don't care that much about multiplayer the way I don't care that much about achievements).

As someone who like to game in person with friends (on LAN or on the same screen), that irked me a little and it irks me even more that in most game, the extent to which offline multiplayer is supported is unclear (I guess because it's not considered "important").

I'm an idealist, but I also like to keep it real and call things by what they are. Better to compromise on the truth than be uncompromising on a lie.

So, if we cut the bs, GOG is not a pure drm-free store (mostly, but not completely) and has not been for some time.

And if we're gonna keep it real, I don't think they are going back. Galaxy, Gwent and their "grand" franchising online vision for their ips are here to stay.

With that out of the way, what do you want to do about it?

Yeah, I get it. If you owned the store, all the games would be 100% drm-free. Me too. But this is beyond our control (no, your boycott won't cause GOG to back down on its commercial interests... yes, its mostly about the money, yes, it sucks).

With the above in mind, I want to maximize ownership on property that I buy (and don't give me that cr*p about the EULA, go try enforce the limitations of the EULA in my home on games I downloaded and see how well that works out for you). That means that I want crystal clarity on the degree to which I own it.

Ideally, I'd like to own it all, but I guess if the extent to which I don't own it is not too valuable (ie, achievements, cosmetic cr*p, multiplayer if the single-player is the main attraction and the game is heavily discounted, etc), I can live with it.

However, if I don't know what I'm buying, then I can't do that now can I?

I hear you.

First things first: Good answer in one sentence. I agree that if you are a diehard purist for this issue than a hard boycott of GoG, Steam, and the Epic Store is in full order. Attempting to bash GoG then saying you're just going to buy from steam and crack it, despite Galaxy not having anything approaching the invasiveness of Steamworks, you'd be a hypocrite. Since you clearly aren't one of those people, you have my respect.

As for the rest. What happens when you can't agree. Stellaris is a long extended game which benefit from a controlled party, thus a central server setup is not particularly useful or viable. But who wants to go find social circles to form a game if you're only going to play 30 minutes, especially if you're going to play competitively. To even have the latter experience would require an out of game player league to even work. And the solutions to the problem I just stated, the use a centralized non-peer server as a searchable list, is nowhere even approaching the crap that is happening in Hitman, let alone trash like Denuvo. But, when you call them all DRM down to the single last action and declare them all unacceptable then you are saying that the server system Warcraft 3 uses is no different and no less damaging than Hitman locking off all aspects of single player progression.

Your "call things as they are" is admirable, and that does mean you sometimes to make distinction between things that are not similar, unless you demand that Warcraft 3 should have only allow private lan hosting and never had a central game list at all, and to even attempt to do such is no different than what is in Hitman. I get frustrated seeing the false equivalence that isn't even necessary or helpful.

You're nihilism on the subject of boycott it not shared. I don't even yet see a reason to boycott. I've made it clear my plan is to 1-star and refund any DRM locked game like Hitman as non-functional with clear information what is locked out and why it makes the game non-functional as advertised as a result on any game I come across, and be ready to not play that game as a result. I think not even pirating is more punishing then trying to crack the thing. It just means GoG has the more absolute faith I had in it before, and now requires me to do research before considering any purchases.

First, a tangent:
I'll help you with the ownership thing. Did you sign a license agreement? Did you sign -anything- after purchasing like a EULA? Congratulation, you own the game in whole and in part. You may ignore any line that tells you that you may no copy/modify it, and may freely ignore any claims you don't own it. Unless you agreed to a lease at the very time of purchase, then it is -sold- to you, not -leased- to you. Most EULAs are filled with unenforceable garbage that would be thrown out of court without a second thought. Even Valve fucks it's own claims of lease agreement when it lets you sign independent license agreements. Can't agree to the state of how you own an item if you don't own it now can you?

This is not a question of legal ownership. This is a question of function. Forgive me for the slight tangent but I like to fight that "you don't own your games" myth whenever I can. To the question at hand, I agree, wholeheartadly. The problem with hitman is they are selling a demo with an online subscription to download the full game, and what is promised on the store is not provided by the base price and DRM free. You are required constant online validation to operate as anything but the demo mode. That is false advertising and I entirely blame IO. I'm not happy that GoG has left this extremely abusable loophole, but IO's false advertising is my main focus. GoG should not be allowing this outright false advertising.

I think we should push GoG to stop playing softball with people who are outright comiting a civil offense against them and us, but that's on them. If they fail it just shows GoG doesn't have the gall to stand up to people abusing them. A note for later sure, but it isn't a reason for a hard boycott of the whole store.

I got more out of that when I though I would. Says quite a bit about the quality of your post, well spoken, I hope my long-winded response is just as well received.
Where else is it available? And I hope to the lord you're not about to say Steam or Epic. Because that would make you yet another gigantic hypocrite. I have seen a few, it bothers me.

When I see a person making as many assumptions as you do, experience tells me it will be painfully difficult to try and engage in reasoned discussion.

Absent GOG providing a clear definition of what "DRM Free" means in practical and legal terms, we have only it's past behavior to go on in determining whether or not GOG "gives a shit about DRM". I honestly don't know for sure, and would like to, because then I could make an informed decision on how best to proceed.

And literally no one cares what you think or if you're bothered by it.

Apparently you are, you decided to insult me for it. so I will again ask, where will you go? My answer when asked of "what if ever game was DRM locked" was "I guess ill start reading books." and "well, time to emulate my old games." And once again, iof your answer is "I guess I'll go back to steam" then it's clear your issue isn't DRM

It's a case-by-case basis, but unless you're making a massive online game, from a design perspective, offline multiplayer is a viable alternative the vast majority of the time, especially in games that already support a single-player scale to begin with.

There usually is no valid game design reason why you can't have one AND the other: A game that supports multiplayer on centralised match-making servers, but also support multiplayer via LAN or otherwise (if you want to keep things streamlined for max implementation simplicity), a self-hosted server (which you can run on a LAN ultimately).

The hurdle is purely technical: the above is hard, especially for small devs. It requires some abstract design considerations prior to implementation and not every devs is skilled at navigating those or even have the time to (in many games it seems, multiplayer is almost an afterthought after the single-player experience is fully fleshed out)

Platforms like GOG and Steam, who have the expertize and domain focus to take such considerations into account deliberately failed to. They created a lot of tooling to facilitate multiplayer integration into their platform, but they never bothered supporting a compatible drm-free alternative in paralell, because it is not in their commercial interest to do so.

And by doing this, they directly contributed to the decline of offline multiplayer.

All of a sudden, a dev who might otherwise have implemented a LAN functionality from scratch (either on release or as a later update if the game sales well) will end up using their libraries instead (to take advantage of the convenience, plus community leverage and all that) and never go back to implementing the offline alternative.

Except that they are. I'm telling you this as a long time software developer and someone who previously worked in a company making networking middleware for games.

Its more overhead for platforms to implement, but you can make it so developers can support both integrating into a proprietary platform as well as provide LAN and/or self-hosted support with very minimal effort from their part. However, platform owners simply will not go there.

I think you may achieve something with boycott efforts provided it is not 180 degrees against the direction GOG wants to go.

If you want to go against potential money cows like Gwent, Galaxy or online transactions in their games, I'd say best of luck with that.

If you want them to clearly label what is what in order to avoid purchasing drmed stuff, I'd say you might have more luck there. The main obstacle to that at this point is the PR image that GOG created for itself.

EULA are a complete mess that should never have existed.

They should have followed the open-source model which tend to use a relatively constrained number of licenses that are culturally more well understood.

They'd like very much to make it legal, but because we don't live in a dictatorship and people have rights, without drm, it is unenforceable and quite meaningless.

Agreed.

They finally crossed a line that people won't put up with with Hitman.

I think the line of how much content you can withhold before a freemium business model would become feasible (ie, the shareware experience) is blurry, but they seemed to have cross it here.

Most people who got the offline game for free would pay significant money it seems to have access to the online-only content, making the offline game the equivalent of a shareware.

I'm not sure if its a question of gall, so much as a question of greed.

Galls would require standing up to someone who has some kind of power and/or hold over you. For example, standing up to your boss takes gall.

In this case, it is just that what their partner was offering was too tempting for them to pass (coupled with the fact that they miscalculated how much the community would push back... if they hadn't, they probably would have passed up on it).

Yours too.

I would say that a true hardliner against DRM would take a more extreme measure: When deciding whether to purchase the game, the person would check to see whether a DRM-encumbered version of the game exists, and if it does, not buy the game at all, even if there is a DRM-free version available.

Unfortunately, at this point it's not feasible to do this, as the available gaming library would be way to small with this constraint.

If you were a complete hardliner against DRM then you should have bailed in 2010 when they added the first game that required online activation for the multiplayer, and that was four years before Galaxy. (And I think there was even before other earlier games requiring 3rd party account to be playable online but I don't remember which ones.)