It's a joke. He was joking about how if there was a scene like that and that's what people would point out, rather than DRM, then the game would be promptly removed.

Okay, I see. Thanks for clarifying.

P.S. Dear Magmarock, I'm not "he."

The fact that he believed it is kinda of funny.

When gog was first announced the DRMfree approach was weird, unheard off.

So when the website went life, we were introudced to wonderful library of no internet needed games.
Back then having crappy internet at home, i used uni computers to download bigger games and install them from usb stick at home.
It was great and made me love this site so much.

9 years later, in 2017, i played gog witcher 3 and steam GTA4 on my new computer.

But internet was cut to my home for 5 weeks when playing those games.

Witcher worked without issues, each day i could start it. Play it. Sure. No achievements (i think) and no playtime counting but game worked and i put 60h into it before i regained internet at home.

Steam broke down adter 3 or 4 days and could no longer start gta4.

Both situations were expected.

Steam games can be DRM free and work without it. But it is unpredictable and can be unkown when buying a new game.

With gotg it was always a certainty. It is installed i can play single player. Internet or not, stable connection or not.

I also had certainty that no matter what happens to gog, to publisher, the game i have installed will be working until my computer breaks down.

Now with this hitman release

It requires active connection to play with some aspects of the game, it requires publisher servers to be active which will get shut down someday.
And if you play online and your router restarts for half an hour you will be kicked out forcing an offline restart without All the stuff.

Release of this kind of game betrays what gog stood for. For what it made it work.
We no longer have that certainty that installed game will work without gog or publisher control.

I believe it is really bad direction being taken by gog management and hurts the business and the community.

After 1400 posts, it's pretty clear that people are upset at this release. So I guess I'll just join the myriad of gamers that feel IOI should review their consumer approach.
I've supported GOG's DRM-Free approach for many years and I wouldn't like to see that vanishing. So, while I'll continue to buy my games here, in good conscience I can't recommend Hitman to anyone - nor any IOI game for that matter regardless of the platform. However, I do hope to see a better outcome for all of this.

Well yeah, that's how owning a game for playing purposes works. You buy a license to use it first and foremost, but you don't own the game, i.e. the game's IP and all of its content; you are not allowed make copies of it and resell them, you aren't allowed to use any parts of the game in your own commercial product, et cetera, you just bought a legal right to use the game. That is still rather different from renting such a right, because once you bought it, nobody can legally take it away from you, unlike with rent.

I'm not sure what you mean by "this".

You can download any game without the client (using SteamCMD), but there's not much point to do so for non-DRM-free games, as you will need the client to play. However, since I'm only interested in DRM-free games, anyhow, that's not a problem for me, because I play only DRM-free/client-free games. I have never downloaded the steam client.

And I'm not sure what you refer to by "90%".

I know of only two 100% DRM-free stores (Zoom and Fireflower) and both their catalogues have little of interest to me. I don't like buying directly from developers because they rarely have sales and even if they do, there's no real way for me to know about that easily. Additionally, most don't have a system to notify you of updates, nor to download games without the browser.

The reason I'm informing others of steam as a DRM-free option is because I myself for years lived under the impression that the steam client was mandatory. And I see this misinformation being propagated again and again. I wish someone would have told me about it back in 2017, when Gwent was released here. I would have begun buying there back then, alongside GOG.

I don't use Linux. I've installed it 4-5 times in the past and always uninstalled it days to weeks later.

That's true. But much more than being inaccurate, it is immensely incomplete. Most of the games I've bought in the past few months were not on the list, yet were DRM-free. I would estimate the percent of DRM-free games on steam to be at least 60%, though I can't prove it.

The idea about alternative stores is nice.

However, it has a not always mentioned risk: What about a security breach? Some can store your credit card information or other sensitive data and can be able, in or the other way, to take money from. The more sites are involved, the more is the area for possible issues and no guarantee you'll be notified. On the other hand, any issue with a big store like GOG will be noticed and reported in some form.

In my view more upsetting is the silence from GOG and that the sales are not paused, nothing is happening, no word, on a workday. Of course people can make mistakes, I just hoped something would be done to try to change the tide and fix the situation, like remove this disaster until the issue is resolved or pause selling a DRM Unfree game.

That's a valid concern. To mitigate this risk, I use Paypal, which guarantees that the store does not get my payments details.

The vast majority of games on steam have drm and the one's that dont are shovelware which no one cares about for the most part.

So you still need client to play 90% of the games on steam. :( Steam has about 30000 games on it. Let's say 3000 are DRM free, which is 10%. That's why I'm saying 90% still need the launcher to play. The DRM free list on steam is only going to get smaller every year.

Not buying from a DRM free stores because they have no interesting game's is fair. But don't be upset when DRM free game's disappear in future.

I have 475 games on steam. I count maybe 10 that are DRM free from my list. Saying 60% of steam is DRM free is very misleading to people

If you like keep eye out for Zoom, they plan on adding 300 more game's soon.


Sorry for my bad grammar I have dyslexia.

I agree saying 60% is misleading. I shouldn't have done that. Similarly, saying 10% is misleading. Neither of us knows the real number. I have 50 games in my steam library and 100% of them are DRM-free. I did inadvertently get 3 DRM'd games in a bundle I bought recently --- I immediately deleted them.

For all practical purposes, it doesn't really matter how many DRM-free games there are on steam or on GOG. Both have more games of interest to me than I will ever be able to play. In fact, my own GOG library is enough to last me for several lifetimes.

I must admit that I don't understand your POV completely. You seem, from your arguments, to care a lot about DRM-free games and gaming, yet you state you own 465 DRM'd games on steam, which I presume you also play. How do you square these two things together?

Having followed this thread the past few days I'll offer my 2 cents and say there was probably no deliberate ill intent on GOG's part for the release of this game in the state it's in (they certainly don't need more negative publicity right now after Cyberpunk). However, what's clear is GOG failed to properly vet the game prior to its release or were simply ignorant of how deeply integrated the game's online mechanics were. Whether this is due to a lack of testing or short-staffing, it's for them to address internally.

I'd also place at least half the blame on the publisher for not providing a properly functioning "DRM-Free" build of the game to GOG out of laziness - this despite agreeing to sell their game on a "DRM-Free" store. This is unfortunately a symptom of a much larger problem where some publishers just don't care about GOG customers and are content to treat us like second-class citizens where they can throw us leftover scraps with minimal effort and expect us to be grateful.

I'm confident the game will be patched eventually, I'll be keen to try it then. But I think more accountability on both sides will go a long way to prevent issues like this happening again.

From the same interview, 9/26/2008: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/09/idiocy-of-games-drm/2/