Stop defending it. It's making you look bad. There's NO WAY to defend it. Any DRM means it's DRMed. 100% of the content of the game is optional! A simple proof-by-induction works... 1 feature DRMed, works for you? OK. N+1? N+2?... until all features are gated behind DRM. There's no way at all to draw any lines in the middle. It must be absolutely 0 features gated behind DRM to be DRM free.

Please smeg off with your being a DRMfender and rationalizing anti-consumer features and other things that make thing WORSE for all of us, you included. It especially looks bad that an approved moderator says that DRM is OK, even for single-player content. (Which is no surprise, we've already had blues saying it on record.)

Ok, in some rare cases, yes. But these games don't feature multiplayer IIRC.
I remember that we've been through this thousands of times here on the forums. There's not much of a difference between Gwent using Galaxy and not using it at all because it's an online only game. It requires a constant connection with the Internet anyway. And it's impossible to think that a game made by a parent company isn't available on GOG.

There you go being a bad person again.

An online only game means it's 100% DRMed. IT. SHOULD. NOT. BE. ON. GOG. AT. ALL. IN. ANY. WAY. Once again, it was INTENTIONALLY designed to be consumer-unfriendly product. Conscious decisions were made during development to make it a spiteful product.

GOG was entirely complicit in this -- GOG Galaxy was developed hand in hand with a 100% online, fully-DRMed, microtransactional product, exploitative product. Galaxy and GWENT were tested with one another. They are 100% interdependent on each other. Galaxy's features were developed with GWENT in mind.

Now if you'll kindly take your pro-DRM views out of this thread and to direct messages and no longer hijack a discussion of Wrath of the Righteous?

Please remember that it's the moderators job to point such things. Our discussion went a little too far from the topic subject indeed, but I was responding to doubts that arose around Galaxy-online only features. And I will gladly continue the discussion on a private channel.

As mqstout said, this is getting a bit off-topic but I have to briefly correct some of what I perceive as wrong here.

GOG is absolutely in a position to dictate to publishers/developers considering at minimum that GOG is a curated store. This is something GOG is always touting too. GOG thus has the perfect reason to exclude said games from the store until the pubs/devs relent on their DRM insistence. Unfortunately, the more GOG accepts "some" DRM, the more GOG trends towards having "no" leverage in such negotiations since pubs/devs can rightfully reply back, "there's no problem with Cyberpunk having DRMed content, so why not accept our game with DRM as-is too?".

Also, the choice isn't necessarily "Galaxy-only multiplayer, or don't have the game on GOG at all". That is a false dilemma, as there are other possible options. For example, the DRMed multiplayer could be stripped while selling the singleplayer game here, as I believe we recently saw as of like a week ago with Tomb Raider 2013? I agree that the offline installers are crucial. DRM-free offline installers of big releases (such as Tomb Raider, such as Pathfinder), are the entire point of me shopping here. Hence disappointment that we can't preload.
And this goes back to my hypothetical from the other day. "Sure, the sandwich is a few days old and naturally has some maggots crawling through it, but it's fine if we just eat around the crust. After all, a sandwich is defined as meat between two pieces of bread and it's not necessary to consume every last bit of it. It's mostly maggot-free. You purists are missing out!".

Please notice there's a number in the common-parlance title of Tomb Raider 2013. It's not the year of our Lord 2013 today and it wasn't 2013 "like a week ago" either. Pathfinder WotR is a new release, developers have to maintain price parity (no, they can't sell multiplayer separately), and GOG has to try to maintain feature parity (which they don't have to, and cannot, do for an old game sold at a pittance with dead multiplayer). Bad sales figures for a high-profile release will make other high-profile releases less likely.

No, it's like you're a vegan who wants a fast food joint to stop selling burgers with beef patties in them. "Just ask them not to put a beef patty in yours." "No."

You've got it backwards. It's like a vegan restaurant started serving dairy, still claims to be vegan, but is really vegetarian. And it poses hazards.

Even if you hadn't got that comparison completely the wrong way round as mqstout pointed out it still wouldn't work.

"I don't mind you putting meat in everyone else's burger, just don't pit it in mine."
"I don't mind you putting DRM in everyone else's Cyberpunk, just don't put it in mine."

Anyway, surely all vegans want the fast food place to stop selling meat because it's bad for animals and a lot of us here want no DRM at all because it's bad for games in general.

I remember a time, not so long ago, when having a DRM free game often meant specific features such as online MP were non existent.(and still is in some cases. See the new tomb raider games that just arrived. But those lack of online features are up to the publisher to incorporate Galaxy support for an old game. They either dont want to or there is some technical difficulty in doing so. ) There was no back end service to implement it. All those online services require a service to host it and act as a intermediary. Unless the developer and publisher want to invest in creating and hosting that service via their own game and have it integrated, then Galaxy is the best solution.

I have had doubts about it being DRM in the past but have put some thought into it and realized that it is not always the easy to implement those features on a game specific level. Servers have to be payed for and clients made for connecting to those servers.

I also get the necessity of Galaxy for day one releases and the difficulty of making offline installers for newly launched games that have heavy patch cycles with updates often being the size of the original download. Bards tale 4 had 3 or 4 of them consecutively during the first week of launch and 2 of them with in the first 2 days.

It is a lot of work for GOG to check all those offline installers and make them. Same goes for the developers. We need to be realistic when it comes to this. I am happy that they still get made and also appreciate Galaxy for what it does.
I would rather use Galaxy than have to struggle with constant day one patches for new games considering how large they are. It was not fun using the offline installers for every patch for Bards Tale 4. :)
Offline installers are better served for when the game is stable and done with its initial launch bug fixing fest.

It is the reality of gaming making these days. We have at GOG an optional client that gives us options that Steam has with their client but we are not forced to use it for the single player offline games or even to download it. This is a good thing. Steam cant say the same. :)

So, thanks for all you and the other Moderators and GOG do here. There is room for improvements and the system is not perfect but GOG implementing DRM free while trying to offer other QOL online features is no small feat. The balancing act cant be easy. :)

Especially for a game that has no multi-player...?

One of the problems of enforcing the use of Galaxy is that certain features which aren't MP are also often locked away and only accessible with the client. I'm thinking of Desktop Dungeons which used to offer daily challenges which had been locked and impossible to access without the client. Offworld Trading Company is another case in point which has two modes Daily Challenge and Infinite Map Challenge which again would need Galaxy. A friend got both this and Tropico 6 which he says warns that he needs Galaxy to have Galaxy running in the background in order to access certain features. According to him MP is accessible and there's no such warning there without Galaxy. There are other games where that is the case.

Clearly this is more DRM than that you'd truly need Galaxy at all to access certain features. Some publishers have had MP locked away behind Galaxy and some offer it without because they have removed it. I'm not sure which it was, Slitherine or Paradox, which removed it from several of their titles.

The problem with Galaxy is it doesn't offer anything for Multiplayer, lobbies, server browsers to actually make this a feature and not a roadblock stripping away MP-modes as well as Online features like the ones I mentioned above. So, again, what good is the client really for? Why should GOG not be able to enforce what the company touts to stand for: DRM-free, which on the most basic level to me it means that everything in a game is accessible without 3rd-party software, even the companies own client environment, DRM-free game without hiding or stripping away features behind said client? You can't tell me that that's a publisher thing at all. Even CDPR does it (goes to show how this is something deliberate while unnecessary (bonus stuff CP anyone?))

I don't want to use client, I don't see need for a client, I have come to GOG originally because here games were offered as offline packages and worked like a charm when Galaxy wasn't around. When it was introduced it more or less became mandatory for MP and as mentioned above to lock away other stuff. I don't support this neither should DRM-free GOG.

I can't get over how unsexily the Succubi in this game are dressed. They look more like convent nuns rather than demons of lust.

You're right that his analogy is bad, but it's also true multiplayer has never been GOG's DRM free focus and there are tons of examples of that. Yes I know the difference between private servers and LAN versus client-based systems, but it's just not something I believe GOG or 90% of its audience cares about. Same for preload "DRM" when the alternative is no preload at all.

Also many who act like GOG has "leverage" really live in another world from this one. GOG is already excluded from a ton of releases due to its DRM free offline installer policy. If they demanded more from publishers, they'd get even less games. They're the only friend we've got, fighting to do the best they can in a world designed around online accounts and clients which the vast majority of consumers not only embrace but PREFER, and yet we give them endless shit for minor stuff. That's just how the internet rolls though.

You are trying to turn the chicken into the egg here. GOG is the party working on and offering Galaxy client/server code to developers not the other way around. Even CDPR made good use of it for distribution of their goodies for CP2077. So GOG got a say in this and are the party whose responsible for this situation. Some developers offer multiplayer without forcing GOG users to use the client, you may still need an account (either Slitherine or Paradox) but ultimately you get to enjoy the full package without strings attached.