Don't really care.

Wait, if they saw that their customers unhappy with the way GOG was going to take, so, maybe, they corrected their plans to less Galaxy-oriented? After all, more happy customers = more money. And, as it was said in the news articles, right now there are many happy guys who giving GOG their money in exchange for DRM-free games? Why they want to risk pushing away this customers who will switch to Steam which also have mash-have wrapper, but much larger games database?

The day GOG decides to sell a Single-Player game, requiring Galaxy to play, GOG is over as a store to me.

I accept Gwent (and I play it a lot) because it's a MMO game. Online access and client are minimal requirements. If they ever decide to create some sort of single-player campaign they should also allow Gwent to be played without Galaxy.

The frontpage still lists DRM-free as the first of GOG's three main selling points. :P

I was talking about the business plans in the same post.

If I can still play it offline without having to authenticate then I'm okay with it. Unless there's a nasty downside to it.

Still sounded like you suggested that GOG has officially already completely distanced itself from DRM-free.

But, well, for once I actually AM going to agree with you on this matter and admit that it is troubling that DRM-free is not mentioned once in the business plan, particularly in the GOG "mission statement". Maybe they omitted it because it might put off potential investors (because DRM-free sounds like the opposite of a lucrative business model to potential investors who are usually utter jackasses) but yeah, it's not good. Very not good.

Scary indeed.
But there's no way GOG would survive if they ever decided to dump the DRM-free standard. The moment they did that, they'd just be a "2nd class Steam" and doomed to crash and burn.

Steam is a titan. The father of digital market and "seller" of 98% of PC games. There's no way GOG could ever compete with Steam on the same level. Would be commercial suicide.

That's what I keep telling myself. Alas, people and especially companies do stupid things.

Yep. Let's hope that GOG's executives never go the imbecilic way.

The only reason GOG has survived and thrived so far is because it's remained all these years as THE drm-free alternative to Steam.
Otherwise they'd have alredy gone the way of Dotemu and other bankrupt digital stores.

People keep thinking that, and yet look how many people are already using Galaxy. Why would they have a problem with something they are already using anyway becoming obligatory? Look how man new users The Witcher 3 brought in and now Gwent's doing the same. The working assumption of the powers that be is clearly that they can use their own games to carve out a sizeable enough part of Steam and Blizzard's market, and hold on to that new customer base by offering them what they have come to rely on elsewhere- an obligatory, immediately self-installing client that will think for them, and that will make them more likely to buy other games here. The only thing that can stop this process now is for that assumption to fail, either by having Gwent not live up to expectations, or having the new customers not use the rest of the store enough. The bottom line is that they want GOG to grow, and they clearly don't belive they can do so without a major shake up in their policies towrds the mainstream model.

Oh they already do it, just not instantaneously.
It's the famous "death by a thousand cuts" or "slowly boiling the frog" as some might say.

The "DRM-free" term gets watered down around here every year.
By now most people think it doesn't need to apply to multi-player at all so this tactic does indeed work as always.

Well it is pretty simple, Breja.

By overwhelming majority of consent the Steam client is vastly superior to Galaxy.
The number of games available on Steam dwarfs that of GOG.
Steam offers early Access.
Steam gives smaller developers a chance.
The price to get a game on Steam is often cheaper than on GOG with sale discounts being larger and sales in general being larger.

Steam has a bunch of games that I wish I could get DRM free and on GOG that I can't because GOG rejected them, will never pick them up or can't because of DRM requirements. Games like Mushihimesama, Fire Pro Wrestling World. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, The Pinball Arcade, Planet Coaster.

So if they all are available on Steam, but not GOG and both require a client why use GOG?

That is very easy to say, though, if neither of those affects you.
I also wouldn't mind if people living in the US had to pay two dollars more than me for every game they buy. After all, the laws, taxation and governance are just so different there...

(I actually would mind, because it goes against my personal feelings of fairness, alas, not everybody sees it that way, looks like.)