Ancient-Red-Dragon: Time4Tea, I agree with the overall gist of your assessment, however, I somewhat disagree on a couple of points.
Those being:
1. Your "updated" post for 2022 is quite underwhelming and unfulfilling IMO (but I don't mean any offense to you when I say that), because it neglected directly to re-address most of the big issues that are still outstanding, such as GOG's refusal to address the Devotion debacle.
By not
re-naming those issues by name, and instead just vaguely citing your past posts about them, that is helping GOG to obscure the issues and, with the aid of much time having passed, (GOG hopes) to erase them from the public's memory.
Whereas the Devotion debacle was front & center at the beginning of the original boycott, now, as of 2022 with that "boycott update" post, it has been completely erased from getting any attention or discussion in the 2022 boycott, other than as a vague, obscure, ambiguous reference that could potentially mean anything.
That's not good.
Instead of completely burying the issue in obscure references, GOG needs to know that we
still expect them to address the Devotion debacle, and the mere passage of lots of time since it happened does not, and will not, ever absolve them of that responsibility.
In other words, GOG doesn't get let off the hook, metaphorically speaking, solely because they've spent eons of time pretending like the Devotion debacle never happened, and ignoring its existence.
2. What you describe as "GOG listening to their customers" in regards to the Hitman GOTY debacle...I find that phrasing to be overly-generous to GOG. I, instead, interpret GOG's semi/pseudo response to the Hitman GOTY debacle to be:
...they realized they were bleeding money, and they also realized that they literally could not afford to outrage their customers on a mass scale yet again, and then ignore that same mass outrage yet again, like they did with the Devotion debacle.
Therefore, GOG semi/pseudo-responded to the Hitman GOTY debacle out of
sheer desperation, and not out of any desire to "do the right thing," the latter of which is the incorrect positive connotation that the phrasing "listening to their customers" carries.
3. If GOG were
really listening to their customers regarding the Hitman GOTY debacle, then they would have publicly answered all of the hardball questions about it that myself and others posted on this board, such as:
a) why did GOG release the DRM-infested Hitman GOTY game on GOG in the first place?
b) why did some GOG staff initially defend its DRM, saying things like GOG believes that gaming has evolved and devs should be able to sell games in the way how they want. And they also made similar comments saying that DRM is okay so long as it doesn't affect gameplay too much. GOG needs to give an explanation as to why they said those things, and if they believe those things still.
c) why did GOG take weeks to remove the game after it was released in it's DRM-infested state?
d) what, exactly, was GOG trying to negotiate with the devs during those weeks...was GOG attempting to negotiate a fudge, where they would have allowed a certain amount of DRM to remain, but not all of it? Yes or No?
4. When you say "the Hitman GOTY debacle came and went"...that implies like it's done & finished and resolved. But no, it isn't...because GOG deliberately ignores, and never answers, the types of questions which I've just described. Until they do (which they probably never will), then the Hitman GOTY debacle remains open, as it has not been fully resolved.
5. I find your concluding statement also to be overly-generous to GOG. That statement you cited from GOG does not actually sound "encouraging on the face of it" at all, because it's
clearly just meaningless PR speak fluff talk, of telling the customers and shareholders what GOG thinks they want to hear.
If GOG really meant that statement, they would have, for example, removed the DRM from Cyberpunk 2077 between the months when they made that statement and the start of 2022. And they also could have announced cancellation of the EGS-DRM deal.
Instead, GOG did absolutely nothing to rectify any of their current DRM issues, nor even making any announcement that they plan to rectify their current DRM issues.
GOG's utter inaction on that front proves, and makes abundantly clear, that they are
not actually re-committing to DRM-free, but rather, they were just regurgitating their main motto, "a curated selection of DRM-free games," because talk is cheap, and it doesn't cost them anything to say that (other than a further tarnished reputation, once most customers who care about DRM-free realize that GOG isn't ever going to deliver on their promise).
Man, I know I don't see eye-to-eye on the subject of achievements, but your comment here is like a 100% Platinum (or whatever the best one is) :) I can't speak for others on this but I know for myself that my trust in GOG was essentially breached forever with the Hitman debacle given that we are still lacking the resolution you mentioned. How can we have faith this store will be DRM-free when there have already been several "fudges" (as you succinctly put it) let alone a massively DRMed release which was up for weeks and still unexplained as to how it came to be here. I would like to add to this point as well, as I have across numerous topics:
