Could have fooled me; I think it should be noted.

Of course on any other forum, a sticky post would be obvious or appended smoothly to the OP.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to your solution for this issue. Unfortunately simple negative but valid feedback isn't enough and some people (including mediocre media outlets) are out for blood.

Kohaku made a great and correct article. The tomshw italian article is bullshit (I already complained in the comments below that article) it just say "it's a 5 years old game, people should know that it is always online" and ignore the fact that gog is a drm-free store (really disgusting).
a better one (still not perfect) from an italian source is the one on multiplayer.it (https://multiplayer.it/notizie/hitman-goty-edition-gog-scatena-polemiche-review-bombing-store-risponde.html).

I think most people unfamiliar with drm-free don't really understand a thing, but at least the same kind of user buy only on steam not on gog so if we all, as a community, decide to boycot gog for this drm release we can only win.

Agreed though my point was its not lies on what was stated by the one person who said it as the one I replied to seemed to believe or won't admit it thats all

But ya we should not dive into the topic here

Have come to GOG for Free-DRM games. And now, you releasing game, with DRM. Nice move.

You do realize, that the "review bombing"(as much, as i don't like it) is the only way to show to someone, that they do something wrong? If company don't read forums or listen their customers, then they have to strike somehow on company wallet, by lowing gamescore ,to scare new customers.

Why should i buy game with DRM here, when i can do it on Steam?

@GOG: At the very least I suggest you to edit out the "Elusive Targets" in your game description. It has been asked here:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_hitman_game_of_the_year_edition_11093/post697
And it has been confirmed to me that the "Elusive Targets" are not available anymore at all (you just can watch the briefing videos) - not online and not offline since they were time limited. So telling people that they are available in the GOG version if going online is advertizing a feature the game does not offer (anymore). In opposite to the main problem at hand however I do believe that this was a mistake that wasn't intended and IOI probably never told you that this feature does not work anymore.

As an alternative you could also edit the requirements as follows:
"Please note: Internet connection and a time machine is required to access Elusive Targets"

ITZ international news now!

Italian
https://www.tomshw.it/videogioco/hitman-il-primo-capitolo-tempestato-di-recensioni-negative/
https://multiplayer.it/notizie/hitman-goty-edition-gog-scatena-polemiche-review-bombing-store-risponde.html

Hungarian
https://thegeek.hu/2021/09/25/hitman-goty-edition/

Polska
https://www.gram.pl/news/hitman-bombardowany-niskimi-ocenami-gog-usuwa-opinie-a-gracze-sa-wsciekli

Russian
https://www.playground.ru/hitman_6/news/hitman_2016_v_gog_bombyat_negativnymi_otzyvami_iz_za_nesoglasiya_s_drm_gog_udalyaet_negativnye_obzory-1140934

French
https://www.marseillenews.net/la-revue-hitman-goty-edition-bombardee-de-drm-en-ligne.html

Spanish
https://www.ezanime.net/revision-de-hitman-goty-edition-bombardeada-por-drm-en-linea/

And this is just the first page of results I got on google news and excludes the Techraptor, Eurogamer and Shitaku articles that have been posted earlier in this thread...

you mean politics in gaming? i didn't start the fire.

sites like Kotaku and GOG themselves started it.
GOG specifically banning taiwanese games while allowing OTT overtly political games like TONIGHT WE RIOT!!!

they can make any excuses they like if they think legit reviews is "review bombing". i will not succumb to the chilling effect.

100% agree.

I’m late to this party but just wanted to voice my displeasure. I buy games here because they’re DRM-free, and this is not that. There’s no good reason to begin with to lock single player content behind an online connection, and there’s certainly not a good reason to sell it here.

> review bombing

You're full of it and you know it. What you're doing here is called a motte and bailey.

"review bombing" (the thing which hampers customer experience) is when random people from all over the internet, who were never interested in a good or service, or bots, leave negative, often fake reviews for a product for a reason unrelated to its quality. This is something stores are justified in trying to stop.

The reviews for Hitman, however, are truthful reviews of a product left by actual customers. We can see the number of reviews and in most cases the number of owned games next to the customers' reviews. We can see they are real people, real GOG customers. If it were a wokeshit game you could maybe retreat to a kinda defensible "they were never intending to buy the game" position, but this is an AAA release. It is not inconceivable that 36 * 5 = 180 people wanted to buy an AAA release on GOG. If you start deleting real customers' truthful critical reviews of a pile of garbage you released, it will be worse than when the last PR guy accidentally offended pedophiles.

Since it took me a while to notice (and maybe someone else mentioning it), I'll mention that under the "my settings" link at the top right of forum pages you can set it to give you 50 posts per page rather than 20 and unless the server is much faster for you than me this will save a bunch of time waiting for pages to load.

I hope that some of the limitations were a surprise to GOG as they can't check everything and some companies will just violate contracts if they think they can get away with it. At the same time, GOG obviously was aware of some of the single player content limitations. I don't personally care about this game at all but I do care about that as it means I can't buy games unless I'm going to play them within 30 days to make sure they actually work and can't buy games anywhere near release since they might add restrictions later (before fixing serious bugs).

I agree with those suggesting supporting the better developers, however the issue is knowing who those are without doing a bunch of research. I suggest that we find or create text that we could suggest for developers to add to their game pages (or at least post in the forums) indicating that the game will never contain online-gated single player content (or if it does, encourage them to be specific about what that is). Ideally this might be done more formally similar to the various food or other product certifications, but at least asking developers to make such promises would be a start. Possibly there could be a longer checklist of various questions of interest (does this have key rebinding, does multiplayer require galaxy, is there blood and if so is there a no blood option, etc.). Anyone know of such text/checklist?

My favorite quote from that article: "As you'd expect, this statement [the one about "review bombing"] didn't gone down well"

Questionable ebonics-gone-horribly-wrong-tier grammar aside, I particularly like the "As you'd expect" part. Even the Dorito-munching room temperature IQ Eurogamer-writing jounlolist realises that, yet the idea that branding quite justified customer outrage as "review bombing" would blow up right in their faces somehow completely eluded gog's top PR people.

So, it took a barrage of negative reviews to catch the attention of various news sites and not the questionable act itself. Oh well...