thefallenalchemist: It sucks, but people are just going to have to accept the fact that
GOG is going to become a mostly DRM-Free store. Their frog experiment worked. What this means is that you will still have a lot of games completely DRM-Free. However, you are also going to have games that still require online connection for extra features. I knew it was going to happen eventually.
Look, I never thought we were gonna get anime tiddy games here either, but we seriously have those now. Things change and GOG is changing to become a mostly DRM-Free outlet. Maybe this will drive another platform to compete, but I don't think so as GOG still partner with a lot of the big AAA companies. They're still the big dog in town when it comes to any number of quality DRM-Free titles.
But now they neither have the arguments or the intention to push publishers to publish DRM-free here. It used to be "You can only publish on GOG, if the game is DRM-free". Now the message to publishers is "You can publish anything you like here." There is no incentive for publishers to agree to stripping the DRM from their games. So you can be sure that the fraction of DRM-ed games will increase significantly.
GOG has basically done everything that the pessimists among us predicted. Testing the waters, going small steps into the direction of a DRM-ed store. And, if some outraged forced them, going half a step back, only to take two new small steps later. The direction was quite clear. GOG's intent as well. They WANT to be a mixed DRM-store. And they really want everyone to use Galaxy. That's the reality of this store now.
Sure, they are driving away the old customers. But apparently they hope that they have by now a new user-base that doesn't care about DRM. At least not enough to stop buying here. It's the same on Steam. The forum there is full of people complaining about Steam - which doesn't interest Steam in the least as long as the same people keep financing it by spending money there. The same is the reality here on GOG. Many complain, that GOG has abandoned their principles and many predict, that GOG will lose customers about this. But very few are willing to be those lost customers who stop buying here.
fortune_p_dawg: this is honestly pretty disappointing. i was excited and bought it outright (i had some store credit so it wasn't a huge loss).
i don't really care that much about the occasional cosmetic thing here or there (the no man's sky thing, the cyberpunk thing). i understand that certain compromises will occasionally be made to get drm infested games here in a state that qualifies them as drm-free.
Only that the Cyberpunk thing wasn't a compromise with some publisher. The publisher was GOG's parent company, who could do whatever they want on GOG - and they wanted to release a small part of the game DRM-ed. As test and to get their customers used to it.
As others have said, it's the boiling frog method. First DRM some cosmetics or irrelevant bonus content. Then some side missions. Then a major part of a game (this is the step where we are). Then entire games. It's only a small step to that. HITMAN is already reliant on always-online DRM for most of it's content. One of the next big releases will be a single-player game that has no DRM-free part anymore.
