mrkgnao: I would now suggest that GOG has decided that DRM-free was no longer maintainable, at least not in a sense that some people here think of DRM-free. They might or might not address the Hitman issue, but the writing is on the wall. It has been there for a while now and it's clearly progressing, so the next test case is not far ahead.
I don't think it's really a case of them deciding that DRM-free is not maintainable, but more that the frontier between DRM-free and DRM is becoming blurrier in more and more games.
I mean before you had clear "DRM" that was here to "
supposedly" prevent piracy or unauthorized copy, but now you have all sort of online "
features" that most of the time have nothing to do with piracy but are used either as "
incentive" (e.g. register on our site and you will have some shiny skin) or to try to create some "
community / social" feeling to increase the game life (e.g. the whole daily mission on NMS ). The Elusive missions in Hitman are also a good example of the later as in "
you have to open the game everyday otherwise you might lose a mission forever"
Of course you can remain "
dogmatic" and consider that if there is anything single player related that is not available offline then the game shouldn't be sold on Gog, but then you have games like X4 that are literally hundreds hours of DRM-free offline game play that needs to be removed (or never sold in the first place) because of an handful of skins that require to create an account on the publisher. Same with NMS, Cyberpunk, or Daylight.
I think Gog simply decided for a more "
pragmatic" approach and if said online content is negligible (by their own subjective standard) and that the game can be played from beginning to end DRM-free then it's ok.
The issue here with Hitman is that, while it's playable from beginning to end offline without any issue, the amount of online content is very far from negligible and they visibly underestimated it