Hello, as you may have noticed I am new here. Just discovered the site and I plan to make a purchase soon. However, I am wondering whether it's possible to activate a retail game on GoG via the CD key, similarly to the steam product activation.

Thanks in advance!

Ah, too bad, thanks for the fast reply. Did the GoG team maybe talk about adding the feature somewhere down the road, or is this final?

I don't think they will ever add that feature. It would have no benefit for GOG (they would actually lose sales from people who already own a physical copy of a game but want a digital backup), and it would be very difficult to do in practice. Some of the games here are pretty old... even if the old retail copies have CD keys, they work differently for every game and would be near impossible to verify.

More than just no benefit to GOG, there is really no benefit to the publishers who see sites like GOG as a way to milk a little more money out of their old IPs, therefore they won't allow GOG to do it. I believe the GOG guys would not be opposed, at least philosophically, to doing something like this otherwise.

Even ignoring the logistics of it, I don't think they would. They'd still be providing an improved product, but not being paid for it. I have a feeling that their profits would go way down if all of a sudden people could buy a copy for $0.10 on ebay and get the compatibility updates from here for free to make it work.

They're marketed on being DRM free and compatible with modern OSes, most games they sell were DRM free or DRM light to begin with.