DRM is the inevitable future of gaming, all gaming, regardless if you approve or not.

That sucks, but so does death, and you're not going to talk, protest, or boycott your way out of that one either.

I wouldn't say disclose, drm shouldn't be in period.

Everything you're saying here applies to when GOG announced they were going to bundle the offline installers with Galaxy, yet here we are. Everything I've seen from GOG in the last few years indicates that they are determined to follow the rest of the industry and adopt the games-as-service model -- especially the CP 2077 release, after saying over and over and over that they weren't going to release it until it's ready. They didn't even have the decency to stop marketing it to console gamers, and instead withheld console gameplay footage, which I'm pretty sure is fraud.

I agree with you as far as completely abandoning DRM-free games, but it's clear to me that they've already abandoned being exclusively DRM-free, and I don't see how this community is going to get that genie back into the bottle, but no harm in trying.

You're right with respect to intent, but I don't think it's a question of whether the technology was created with DRM in mind, but whether or not it is utilized for that purpose, and there's no question that it can be.

Streaming is the future of everything, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna start streaming all my games today. More to the point though, GOG can't sell me A and then deliver B. They bill themselves as a DRM free store, so they should sell DRM free games. Especially when 90% of the reason I care is the principle of it, since there are ways to "un-DRM" everything anyway.

What is the point of GOG, if I have to carefully comb over offerings for DRM? Steam is pretty much the same thing, except with discounts, inhabited forums, and a wider variety.

GOG is dead to me if they lose their sole selling point.

I think GOG should be 100% DRM-free, which would makes labels a bit redundant.

Truthfully though I think they should be labeled by every store as a matter of consumer protection law. If I buy an Playstation game (or whatever console) there is a long statement about how it's for use only on Sony Playstation 5 consoles blah blah blah. Same for all all the other consiles unless that's changed in the past few years. They also list things like how much space is needed, how many players can play, etc. Computer games list hardware requirements. It seems like a major hole (I'm sure it's intentional) that international law doesn't require disclosure of DRM. Partcularly given what DRM stands for. If It's management of Digital Rights and I the consumer (who paid for the product) am not granted the rights to manage my copy of the product, who exactly has those rights? And what is it I've forked over money for exactly?

If you're on GOG I'm going to assume you know the answer to those questions. I think a court might have some things to say though if they were posed those questions. At the very least I have to think Games as a Service (and if I don't own all the rights to the product permanently that's ultimately what DRM is) need to be very clearly labeled as such. If I don't 100% own all of the content which I'm able to access anytime it's some form of a revokable rental or service. If I rent a car I sign multiple forms for insurance purposes but also agreeing that this is a rental for a certain amount of time so there's no confusion that I've somehow purchased a new BMW for a few hundred bucks. Digital content might have User Agreements but I think a large prominently (must take up 20% of the image space) displayed "This item is a rental which you will not at any point now or in the future own" on all banners and promontional materials is not out of line.

People can still give EA money every year for NBA2K, and some will, but it might make a lot of people question what they're spending money on BEFORE servers start getting cut off that eliminate half the content.

This shouldn't even be a discussion on the forums, but I suppose we have to thank the incompetents in the C-Suite.

It's not as clear cut as that.

A good example would be the Dreamcast (for peoples old enough to remember), it was using GD-Disk, while officially the "excuse" was that it had an higher storage capacity than CD-rom, the unofficial reason was of course to prevent piracy as nobody, except a Dreamcast or dev kits were able to read the disks.

So even though it was most probably created with the intent of preventing copy, it was still not technically a DRM because it was not an active technical solution made to prevent/limit copy, it's was just a different media technology that just so happen to prevent users from being able to read the disk on non-Dreamcart hardware.

And once peoples figured how to use a Dreamcast drive to transfer the ISO to a PC then all games were pirated in no time because, apart from the technical barrier of the support, there was no DRM at all on them.

You sir are a fool. Don't spread your bullshit. There is nothing right you said in your stupid message
Mmo are drm, always online is drm, nothing about be able to copy a client (that use drm) means it's not drm. You fail to see drm, you fail to understand what drm means, you are stupid as hell

True though what LiefLayer said is also correct - many of today's games go online for "dual use" reasons and the term has evolved to deal with that beyond what someone wrote in 1994 as some "narrow slice" definition that's already obsolete.

False assumption as many definitely and absolutely have DRM. An MMO doesn't intrinsically have DRM purely because it's an MMO, yet at the same time that it needs to go online doesn't mean it doesn't have DRM included as a separate issue anyway. Example - lookup say New World on PCGW and it clearly states "All versions require Steam DRM, Easy Anti-Cheat DRM and a constant internet connection for all game modes."

Whether you personally want to argue that "but... but.. if it needs an always online connection so that it isn't DRM" is irrelevant when all versions are clearly verified to use Steamworks DRM on top of those MMO online requirements anyway, and even if you removed those "Totally Not DRM (tm)" MMO stuff, it would still be as 100% DRM'd as any other Steamworked DRM'd game, MMO or not. That's actually true of many online / MMO games, where if you search for them you'll see they can and do have layers of DRM as separate issues anyway. It's like wedging a chair underneath a closed door handle and arguing "the door isn't locked because a chair technically isn't a lock" whilst ignoring the deadbolt on the door that's locked anyway...

I think I was stupid indeed to think you were trying to actually have a genuine conversation about what define a DRM or not. Your only argument seems to be "[i]I don't like it therefore it is DRM and if you disagree I will start name-calling[i]" and sorry to say but IMHO it's not a valid argument, some could even say it's not an argument at all.

There are plenty of things that are not customer-friendly, limit their rights, are dangerous for media preservation, and are worth fighting against but yet are still technically not DRM.

Calling everything under the sun "DRM" regardless if it is or not doesn't help at all it will only result in peoples rolling their eyes and not taking you seriously.

Of course, I am not naive. Ubisoft tried to use this kind of excuse with their "always online because it needs to be but totally not a DRM" on Assassin Creed 2 and other games a couple of years ago.

But still I think it's important to use the right definition rather than trying to force everything under the DRM designation.

Do you really think that Hello Games put the daily mission in NMS skies because they cared about piracy ? Especially multiple years after the game release ? Do you think that Egosoft asks you to register to get a couple of paint jobs for X4 because they thought that doing so would have any impact on how much the game would be pirated ? (paint jobs that you can get as mods anyway)

And yet people call that "DRM" as if it was some sort of absolute binary state and I think it's wrong. Saying "I don't like online gated content, it's stupid that you need to register to get X or Y cosmetics, it should be available in the offline installers" is one thing and honestly I agree 100% with it, but immediately calling it DRM and putting it at the same level than full blown online activation (i.e. to play the SP part of the game) is IMHO counter productive.

You are right there are some MMOs that, on top of being online, also uses DRM on their clients, I should have been more clear. My point was only that being always online, as bad as it might be, doesn't define immediately makes it having a DRM but I shouldn't have made it sound like a generality.

"DRM" isn't a static set-in-concrete term though. It already evolved from people hearing the word and automatically assuming "CD check", "code wheel" or "don't copy that floppy" in the 90's to people hearing it today and automatically assuming only "online checks" whose Rights Management goes well beyond copy protection. Trying to separate "needs to go online and you cannot backup that online content" with "DRM or not" is futile when in common modern parlance people see online-only content as being DRM'd for the simple reason that the underlying desire for DRM-Free is game preservation, ie, being able to play a game offline 20 years in the future as you bought it, with no content missing, nothing interfering in the startup (eg, SecuRom depracation on W10). People really don't care about arbitrary "technicalities" when they want DRM-Free precisely for the generalities of offline content.

These arguments ultimately boil down to arguing over the evolution of language. The DRM of today is not just the slim 100% pure copy protection definition of the 90's, for exactly the same reason as "the cloud" today is more than just "a visible mass of particles of condensed vapor (as water or ice) suspended in the atmosphere of a planet"... And nowhere is this more obvious than on the Steamworks DRM page for developers where "We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won't work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.)" is basically another way of saying "We now see online-only features doing double-duty as 'soft' DRM". So when game stores and game developers openly redefine it as that, then why wouldn't GOG gamers adopt the same meaning in general conversation?...

No, I know you don't really approve of the Hitman game here either, I just think we have to kind of look at circumstantial evidence as it were instead of waiting for an official statement such as "GOG now sells DRMed games", which at that point would be too late to reverse.

I'm not sure they would even do an official "bring on the DRM, who cares", but if they have been steadily bringing on the DRM and increasingly pushing boundaries (first multiplayer content, then cosmetic content, now large swaths of singleplayer content with Hitman Online Abomination Edition), I feel we can read between the lines.

I think a DRM-free store should be clearly committed to DRM-free with no ambiguity or edge cases.

Since we definitely have those, though, we can ask "is the store getting more committed to DRM-free gaming, less committed, or about the same?" I would contend that the store has been getting much less committed to DRM-free and that is only in the few short years I have been here.

Also this is neither here or there but I posted in the Hitman release thread about FCKDRM campaign which also gives us a window into what GOG viewed as DRM-free. Would you believe that the Hitman Lame of the Year release violates ALL of the list that describes the features of DRMed content.
A million times this. Frankly if someone sees me as a "fanatic" or whatever when I call online-locked content DRM, that is their prerogative but I am not wrong and it is really just revealing some insecurity imo.