Timboli: What right-thinking company would take on DRM-Free?
While DRM-Free is great for those of us customers who love it, it is a very big limiting factor to attracting game providers and selling games.
In fact, if GOG are in dire straits now, you can put that down to the difficulties in solely supporting DRM-Free, and the actions they have taken in regard to that. Not saying they have always made the right choices, just that it has been difficult for them, and perhaps there has been a level of desperation, which often doesn't lead to smart thinking.
I won't delve in the motivation of GOG and it's parent company (desperation/greed, etc).
But yes, maintaining long term ownership of gaming titles (both keeping them accessible online and keeping them working with future OSes) is a non-trivial endeavor that is more akin to a service than a fixed product that you sell.
This is why I'm feeling uneasy about GOG just selling games and then not charging any recuring fee for keeping them available online and updated (or supposedly doing so for the later case anyways). As long as they keep selling, it kinda works I guess, but as they acrue an increasing backlog of sold titles with their userbase, that model will either collpase or start showing cracks (as it has done already I believe) if they don't sell an ever increasing amount of titles.
As such, I think its in the interest of anyone who has a sizeable backlog with GOG to just pay a recuring service fee to GOG for them to host the games online and work more closely with developers to get the latest updates of the games and keep those games working with upcoming os releases, sometimes after the developers themselves have lost interest in their games.
nightcraw1er.488: As for drm free, you are fighting a losing battle. The world is moving further away from drm free or ownership, in fact, I don’t see 10 years down the line people owning anything at all, it’s simply a rush to the lowest common denominator. Even drm free games have gated content, crippled systems (mods for example), added requirements etc. just as consoles are removing all physical media, pc gaming is moving to streaming. Heck one day soon you just stream everything to a contract rented tablet, there will be nothing else.
I think interest in ownership of intellectual property has always been proportional to the degree of attachment with said intellectual property.
You will always have a percentage of the populace that cares about such things (might not be a dominant percentage, but it will always be there) regardless of the current climate.
For everyone else, various events will cause more mainstream interests in ownership to wax and wane.
Atm, online services like steam and Netflix have proven reliable and cheap, causing a waning of interest in owership, but you are always one crisis away from that interest resurfacing.
I guarantee you that if Steam shuts down in a month (or change their access policy to be more restrictive) or Netflix loses some of its beloved series due to some freak occurance (ex: Yeah... we got hacked pretty deeply and "Stranger Things" and "Cobra Kai" are gone... like forever, sorry guys... did anyone by any chance do illegal copies?), you will have a ressurgence of interest in ownership.