I'm waiting for it to be an Epic Games Store freebie. I'm patient. :)

And in my view, elements as these stop being "single player elements". They are rewards for online play which carry over into SP - which is by design in NMS, because it's a single player game in which you can activate some online "community" functions, if you choose so. Go offline, and the game doesn't freeze or kick you out or anything - it just carries on with what you currently have.

And it's not - like some people seem to think here - like "you go online and get the living ship". That would be indeed some form of DRM in my opinion. You actually do have to work for it, grinding community missions to get the required 3000 quicksilver to buy the Void Egg. HG's intention here is clearly to reward online players with something cool.

When I saw the Living Ship update I thought, "How cool, I want!". When I found out what I would have to do to get it, I thought "That's bullshit, you can keep it where no sun ever shines.". I didn't think of "DRM" or "single-player elements locked behind online-only walls". More like someone handing you candy, and when you unwrap it, drooling already, it's a flavour you really detest.

So if we treat stuff like the Living Ship as "not SP", it suddenly becomes important if it's major or minor content that is "not SP". Because some games are clearly centered around MP, with SP only functioning as a training mode, or token for "we have a game that works offline too". Games, where most of the content is intended for multiplayer, and pure SP gamers will feel cheated if they accidentally buy them.
But that is clearly not the case with NMS, I don't now about the situation in Absolver. In fact I would understand if people felt cheated buying NMS on the premise of getting an MP focused game, because it clearly isn't the main purpose.

It should, of course, always be clear what you're getting into, when you buy a game. And I agree that a game that promises offline play, but barely works in single player mode shouldn't even be on GOG. It should be made clear if some content is only available when playing online, so any potential buyer can make their own judgement if the game is good enough, even when they play offline only.

And anything any MP feature adds to the game should always be "nice to have", completely optional of course. Crippling an SP experience by requiring some online component to make it complete would indeed be a no-go for me too. But that's simply not how I see NMS.

I would reply "your mom says otherwise" but that would get me banned.

Maybe you are right but GOG Galaxy is like what 2 GB?

Ewww, you are necrophiliac.
Nothing wrong with that of course, to each his own, but it is still disgusting.

As said, it is irrelevant whether GOG Galaxy takes 2 GB or 2 kB. People don't "oppose" it due to its size on their hard drive.

Size does not matter, except in the case of baby dicks.

Don't want to drop more gasoline into the fire (things are already pretty heated as they are), but I'm reading plenty of comments here about people boycotting GOG, etc etc...
And while I'm not 100% satisfied with the state of things concerning NMS and its online stuff I urge people to think carefully before trying to damage GOG's business.

Amazon too has now launched a game streaming service. Which means that DRM services are indeed getting stronger on the video-game market.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/09/25/amazon-announce-cloud-gaming-service-luna/

For those who really want a place to get their games DRM-free, your best option still remains GOG. And honestly I'm not exp
expecting Zoom or other stores to get much better. It took GOG more than 10 years to get where they are now. And we all know how bumpy that road was.

So I say : let's see how GOG reacts to this (if they react at all) and how things evolve from here. No need to go to extreme measures. If GOG collapses you can all bet your asses that's it's game over for the DRM-free in videogaming.

I'm not some sort of GOG fanatic here. I know very well the flaws in this store. But - speaking for myself - this is the only place where I buy my games and I still see it as an oasis in an ever more agreessive game market which is fighting hard to stupidify gamers and remove consumer rights.

That's the thing - most here aren't.

Just because some might resort to boycotting doesn't mean that the whole community is getting irrational and goes out with a pitchfork for a nice crisp witch hunt. Most here just don't want the limit to be pushed further.

The idea that gog can be defended on the basis if "well, who else is there?" shows the way it's going. In effect, if gog just started allowing deneuvo(sp?) games on here tomorrow, the excuse would be that it's the only places that lets you get Metal Gear DRM-Free and that's good enough. Then, it's still DRM-free with mandatory galaxy, because there's no checks and installs still work offline, just have to use task manager to kill galaxy.

Let's be blunt, here.: gog has no principles. It clearly violated them all a long time ago. Meanwhile, we might have a legal complaint against GOG, given DRM-free was part of our contract with them for NMS. I'll let someone with more money than me consult the lawyer, though. This case is unique compared to previous games, because NMS added the DRM after the fact.

I guess I was wrong. We indeed seem to have a different definition of what a single-player element is. I understand your definition, though it is not the one I use. I hope you understand mine.

I think I do. The problem is with NMS really blurring the lines of SP and MP, because it's "seamless". Everything you earn is SP is used in MP too, and vice versa.

What I think HG could do is, simply make quicksilver obtainable in SP. I mean, you get a small quantity in the main mission anyway (to get you hooked, if you will). But make it hard to obtain in SP. Maybe it's only on very deadly planets, maybe it's only as a reward for really hard SP missions.
This way online players still get a reward - it's easier to accumulate the the stuff and get the thing quicker - and pure single player users aren't left out, and can even get a sense of achievement when they finally get the 3k for the Void egg.

I mean, they want to lure people into doing "community stuff", and it's IMO fair enough. They don't ask money for their expansions, they don't sell ingame currency by MTX. Community keeps a game alive. Other games like Dying Light also have community-focused events with extra content - and I've heard nobody complain about that.

I think that's a good suggestion. And I believe that's more or less what others have suggested here too: make quicksilver obtainable offline, not locked behind an online wall (and also add the missing quicksilver shop contents).

The only remaining difference is that you seem to be willing to live with their not doing that, whereas others insist that they do, or have GOG delist the game.

Yeah, well, as I wrote, I can write off the Living Ship as "online content only". The game is massive enough as it is, and it's not like something really essential is missing if you play offline. If they had never released it, people wouldn't miss it at all. It's of course not a nice situation, esp. for people like me who are online, and thus actually see the things from other players, but refuse to be coerced to take part in the "community". People with pure offline play won't even see any mention of the thing, and someone who never heard of it would probably wonder what we're talking about here.

And that's the reason I find calls of delisting excessive, especially since HG, after the messy release, has been a paragon of a dev caring about their game and the players. I've seen it evolve from release, and it's simply magnificent what they did here. Other companies would have taken the money after release and run (we've seen it all, I guess). Others would have asked money for some or all of the massive upgrades (plenty of examples here on GOG too). Actually I can't name a single studio, not even CDPR, which has put as much effort in their game for free after it was released. And all on par on GOG and Steam, with at most a day, most of the time only a few hours between Steam and GOG. And people want to declare this company "the enemy", for a (IMO!) minor thing. How does this make us all look, as the GOG community? A bunch of ungrateful, grumpy old-timer with anger issues? As HG I would wonder if I should bring my next game here at all. Well done, folks.
If someone wants to make a thread "Games that treat offline players as second class citizens" and list NMS there - feel free to do so. I'm curious what other games people will come up with, I'm pretty sure there's more - and worse - offenders. Of course the rules for a thread like this would probably lead to a heated discussion - see our disagreement about "single player content".

Yes, I've said this forever about Galaxy. People see any client as a betrayal, as replacing the downloader with Galaxy offline backup downloads as a betrayal, but there simply isn't any other store anywhere promising those offline versions at all. GOG could double their library of higher selling AA and AAA games if they stopped providing offline installers, but they keep doing it when no one else is. Using their app to download them is an incredibly small price to pay, and is not DRM.

This issue is obviously more sketchy, though I still feel like I don't know the game well enough to say exactly how sketchy. Like you say, and like with Deus Ex 4 not long ago, I'll wait to see what GOG do before condemning them. But the same logic still applies... some option items bound to online play is far, far different from an activation requirement to play the game, and no one but GOG is going to fight to give you that completely offline experience in 2020, even if they slip up here and there.

I disagree here. Being forced to use a closed source app to download my stuff would be DRM for me. I can't control what this app does, it might not run on my machine, and it would require me to have internet at home.

The beauty of GOG is not only that I can use open source tools like gogrepy.py to download my games, but also that I can go to any library, internet cafe (some still exist), a friend or even work and download my games there to a portable disk using any modern browser. That is DRM-free.

I seriously doubt they'd add any more AAA games let alone double them by scrapping the offline installers whilst simultaneously still requiring that games downloaded via galaxy remain DRM-Free. That makes no sense when devs don't even see the offline installers at their end (they upload their game and GOG builds the installers from that, not the devs, so there's zero impact on devs from GOG providing them).

On the other hand having spoken to several devs via e-mail suggesting they consider a GOG release, the one thing a lot of them consistently don't like is having to recode Steam achievements to Galaxy specific ones, ie, it's Galaxy itself that's become the root cause of increasing developer workload of releasing new games on GOG that's putting them off a lot more than GOG offering zero-workload offline installers ever did...