Dont question.
Ignorance is strength.

Mandatory DRM-free is arguably GOG's last stand against Steam. Take that away, and GOG might as well become a glorified Steam keys reseller.

Steam has drm free games
Gog has always online games
Steam has command line downloaded
Gog has 70% mandatory galaxy
Lines blurry

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Your other points are valid though.

I feel ya, m8. Why do peeps bring up piddling nonsense when there are far more important things that need addressing -- like saving our sorry asses from going extinct? o.O

negatory.

i have on obscene amount of games on here. probably more than any functional man with a family and mortgages should have... that said, not one title ive purchased has ever required me to use galaxy. don't even have it installed.

Yeah, but with your level of enthusiasm, how can you be sure you'd notice? ;p

Unfortunately (or fortunately possibly depending on how you look at it) I think we're far to late to do anything about that anyway, might as well just enjoy the ride.

Doing such things and devaluate the offline installers into something like "backup crippled files that don't contain the whole game and miss a lot of things", is just one step more towards their drm strategy. Just pushing more and more customers into their drm client Galaxy, that's how I see it. No and no.
Like any other distributor/game seller they are only interested in maximum profit, which they have shown by developping drm Galaxy client with games like Gwent, which can't be played without the totally optional Steam ... sry ... Galaxy client.

my enthusiasm wains whenever i see the words "connect, share, friends" or "required" pop up in a game description.

in all seriousness tho, my hard line in the sand is drawn if/when gog ever decided to do away with the offline backup/classic installers. that would be it for me. yet my standards arent as rigid as some folks though. i dont expect that a drm-free version will have all the modding/social/multiplayer/online features that a steam/galaxy integrated version might. i don't get bent out of shape when the gog version is missing a soundtrack extra or has a higher price than steam. i'm here for the drm-free pretty much exlusively. i DO expect that theyre updated within a reasonable amount of time (which certain incredibly lazy devs dont seem to care about i.e. gearsforbreakfast, scambleer,etc)

if steam had a 'backup installer" option from the getgo i never wouldve left pc gaming in the mid 2000s and might not have ever discovered gog. when i realized that my copy of dark messiah of might and magic could not be backed up and used without steam you could almost cut my lack of enthusiasm with a knife. i knew that's where it was all headed (because people are always inclined to pick the most anti-consumer option) and dropped it.

anyway...

That's me trying to play mahjong on win10 with a bleedin' ad server, and nag screens for this, that, and anything else they can think of to get me to their store.

GOG wants to be true competition to Steam, thus GOG does want to encourage people to use Galaxy (especially since many new customers are used to a client like Steam). GOG currently is not a DRM store like Steam though.

But hey! If you back up your games, it won't matter if GOG goes DRM in the future! :D yay

I'm more concerned about getting patches, and in regard to Galaxy, achievements for games that are on Steam but not Galaxy. I have other concerns. I am not worried about GOG remaining DRM-Free (backup your games like @tfishell suggested if you are concerned). I think this will always be a DRM-Free platform, and I think CDPR is an excellent business.

Look, GOG really has painted itself into a corner with their "DRM-free identity" and all that jazz. It was a great way to carve out a niche for the site 10 years ago, to establish an identity and a sort of "street cred" with the old-school gamers. But fast forawrd that decade and we're at a point where that policy has become almost nothing but a liability to them. They have outgrown the niche and dream of ditching it entirely, because the relevance of that niche is shrinking by the day. The majority that wants everything to be always online, social, in the cloud, streamlined, taken care of by a client etc. is so overwhelming it would take sheer devotion to the ideals of yesteryear unsullied at all by any business acumen or desire for profit to stay the course.

The same goes for CDPR Red, really. They are like a hair metal band that started their career in the 90s, or really any rock band in the 2000s. What theym make (single player story focused RPGs) has basically lost mainstream relevance by the time they got really big. The sheer quality of their creative output carried them past that for a while, but it can't last. There is a new interview with someone from Ubisoft making rounds right now about how they will focus even more on games as service and ditch longer narratives in single player, and that's pretty much uniformly the course of the entire gaming industry, because that's what people want apparently. That's where the money is. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's just the way things are going.

Is GOG still DRM-free? Yes, absolutely. Will they remain so indefinately? No way.