speakk: I feel like GOG has been going downhill in the aspects that brought be to GOG and kept me engaged here:

- DRM free? You can certainly download games without a client (still, even though god damn those clients are being pushed hard), but there is no guarantee that the game is actually DRM free anymore. You always have to go read through the comments to find out if the game actually implements a DRM scheme or not, GOG often will not tell you.

- Update notifications? An awesome feature that literally kept me coming back every day. Well, after silently dropping them as a feature, indeed without letting anyone know, I found the huge community updated thread with new updates listed. The community is now responsible for doing the job of the platform. I can't even sort my library by last updated to be able to look up the changelogs myself.

- The client? At its current state the client is something I can ignore, but considering the slippery slope of more DRM games coming into GOG, I wouldn't be surprised if more and more functionality was moved onto the client. And no, I don't want a linux version of the client either, I can already type 'cd ~/games ; ls' and be done with it, or dl a game installer from the site.

- All platforms equal? Now this one is not black and white because I certainly don't have any hard data on this, but it certainly _feels_ like more and more Windows-only games are coming to this place. However, I won't put the blame of this completely on GOG, it's just something that has made me sad. Feel free to ignore this particular point if you wish. And btw I too have enjoyed some of the Windows games here via Wine, so I'm certainly not completely against it anyway.

All in all, GOG used to be a place I would, without reservations, recommend for everyone, telling them this is the only way not to let DRM become the only thing people know. Nowadays though, I'm starting to hope a viable alternative might pop up, because I'm certainly losing hope with GOG itself.

Discussion welcome, keep it civil and be nice to each other! :)

Leroux: I guess you are but the question is why do you even feel the need to? If you don't care, why get involved at all? What's the point? Do you think they will listen if told in such a condescending way? Isn't that just fighting drama with more drama? :/

ASHLIIN: So what should gog change to remain competitive?
I think it should have mod database , soon even Epic store will have it.
What else would you like?

ASHLIIN: So what should gog change to remain competitive?

P8j6: Not true. Forcing multiplayer throught 3rd party servers is DRM.

P8j6: DRM free is, if I can get the game and be sure to be able to play the MULTI PLAYER 50 years later even if the internet would suddenly cease to exist. I just connect two old PC's through ethernet or serial cable and im ready to some multiplayer fun.

blotunga: I'm with timppu here. I think as long as I can easily use a script to back up my entire collection and can play any single player campaign without needing a connection/client, I'm all good with GOG.

NuffCatnip: If you want to stay, stay. If you want to leave, leave, but please don't create these threads. Why all the drama?

NuffCatnip: This is nothing but a storefront for crying out loud.

TheDudeLebowski: Also, back in 1996, if I wanted to play Quake multiplayer, I had to connect to my ISP's Quake servers. They had nothing to do with id Software, and I can safely assume that id Software wasn't even aware of my ISP's existence. Do you think that was DRM?

ChumpThump: He did. It's whether you need to depend on some kind of external party to access features of the product you've purchased. I think it's a reasonable definition, and find that it's one of the preferences that GoG explicitly catered to when it was establishing itself.

StingingVelvet: I absolutely think there's an argument to be made that GOG sells games with "DRM'd multiplayer." I think it's either that or nothing in most cases, since multiplayer relies so much on clients nowadays, but maybe GOG should be more clear on that.

However I also think people are being silly when they think this means anything in regards to singleplayer.

ChumpThump: It's been a while since I've backed up my collection, and I wasn't as organized as this. I've dabbled in using some command line stuff with youtube-DL to download streaming stuff I wanted to back up (and using a text-replacer application to automate the command to ##ytv so I don't have to type the whole code each time), but I'm new to scripting.

Do you know where I can learn to write a script to do all that, and have the downloads happen in the background? I'm on Windows 10, if it makes a difference.