JAAHAS: I said most developers, not all and unfortunately some of them seem to be so used to implementing their multiplayer support through the Steam API that they would rather hack in the Galaxy API to replace that than start from scratch.
I'm talking about developers who are releasing games on GOG at all. Again, the vast majority of them already support DRM-free multiplayer, and a bunch more would support it if GOG removed their DRM. None of this means having to start from scratch. Also the few that require third party services generally don't actually depend on them for much. Adding a way to bypass that and form a game directly between players is hardly starting from scratch. It's comparable to adding the options menu and making keys rebindable, if that.
Turning a DRM'ed single player game DRM-free only requires cutting out the DRM and in most cases you would not be able to tell if that has been done or not if I would only allow you to access the game from it's main menu whereas some forms of multiplayer would only become "DRM-free" by being replaced with some more DRM-free friendly form of multiplayer, which would take a lot more resources to do and would become an additional thing to support, so we are talking about many orders of magnitude greater expenses than what you seem to be thinking.
Again, most games here already have DRM-friendly multiplayer. But for whatever reason (actually I can guess: control, drm), the publisher wants you to first log in with their (or GOG's) service. Removing that login check and allowing a direct connection between players is hardly more work than cutting out DRM. It doesn't take much resources. Adding the DRM in the first place required way more resources.
Actually, my point was that regardless of how much one might care about multiplayer, some forms of it may have the online only disease spread too deep into their design
That is not true at all for most games here. Very few games here have multiplayer spread deep into their design. But some still have DRM.
This isn't about not caring at all about multiplayer, but acknowledging that over the years the old school multiplayer we would prefer has "evolved" into something else that can't always be reasonably expected to work DRM-free no matter how much we would wish for that
Sorry, I don't see any evidence of that. Old school multiplayer isn't gone at all but these games today require you to authenticate with third party services before they let you connect. That's not a big thing to work around.
WoW
Yawn, please let's not talk about MMORPGs and other such games that aren't here today and aren't coming here tomorrow. That's a complete straw man. Let's talk about games that are actually here but require third party authentication for no good reason. For example, Torchlight 2.