Your fears all stem from companies that always were DRM-embracing from the start and have used technology to try to increase the amount of DRM they use and to try to restrict and control what people can do. That is a matter of business philosophy and not something inherent in the software itself. These companies have a core belief that DRM is necessary to prevent privacy and that they can and will stop piracy by using it. They may have created software clients as an interface to their storefronts and for the installation and updating of the software they sell, and at the same time they may embrace DRM technologies - but there is absolutely nothing whatsoever that fundamentally ties the creation and optional use of such software to the concept of using DRM to fight piracy, they are totally orthagonal concepts.

GOG however is completely opposed to DRM on every level. I don't know if you have ever read any interviews with the executives or other employees of GOG before, or watched any video interviews with them, so you may not be aware of just how opposed to DRM GOG and their parent company are, and how this is a fundamental viewpoint of the company and their business strategy. I highly encourage everyone to do a web search to find out about the origins of the CD Projekt company themselves and how they came to be years ago, and ultimately how GOG came to be years later, as well as CD Projekt RED the developers of The Witcher series of games. It is very clear that these are not just a bunch of pointy haired business executives with oak desks and leather chairs analyzing stock charts who have never even played a game before, but rather this is a company formed by gamers themselves - people just like the rest of us who are here to buy games. They created a company to do something nobody else was doing at the time and following a set of rules rather unprecedented and to which probably had a lot of people shaking their heads saying "that'll never work". But it does work, and they've very much shown that to be the case. GOG's game catalogue has increased in size by about 50% in the last 12 months and appears to be accelerating which in my eyes at least is a huge confirmation that their business model of DRM-free gaming is successful and validated. I'm sure they feel the same also.

Game client software can provide gamers with quite a number of conveniences and improved user experience potentially, can provide tremendous convenience, provide superior modern communication technolgies integrated directly into the software, can provide more robust mechanisms for updating software, making purchases, social networking, and a variety of other things. These are just simply conveniences, much like the GOG website is a convenience over filling out a paper form and sending it in the mail via postal carrier and waiting 2 months for your games to arrive. There are people out there who can easily use something like Steam but who would be confused as to how to download a game and install it from GOG and manage updates, etc. Just this week alone I've seen some new customers here on the forums seeking help getting games installed who were used to Steam and other services and were stating how complex and confusing they found GOG to be. They said it in a light hearted manner and not as a criticism of the service, and most of us GOG'ers would feel a little surprised that someone would find GOG "complex and confusing" but the fact is that the average computer user is not a sophisticated person when it comes to the technology, and a lot of people need hand holding to do stuff.

Our computers are here to make our lives easier for us, and anything that can be automated or made more convenient to us to save us time and effort - which isn't, is not using the technology to the best advantage. Some people might have an old i486 PC and want to download GOG games and edit their AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS for the rest of their life and scoff at anyone that wants this process to be made easier, but the fact is such people are in the miniscule minority of people out there, they are the smallest possible market and a company wishing to expand and sell more product is not going to have much room to grow by catering to greybeard couch potatoes. The money is where the masses are, and if you're doing something successful you want to reach more and more customers so you have to look at ways to make your product or service attractive to more people, and in the case of GOG they need to explore what it is about other services people use that makes people attracted to those other services.

People can scoff at Steam until the cows come home, and I have my own complaints about Steam as well but the fact is that Steam is incredibly convenient and that people who think it is pure garbage are in the minority. In fact it is the largest gaming digital distribution service out there and it didn't get to be that way by doing everything wrong. Gabe's philosophy was to make the service extremely convenient and easy to use and by doing so create a value proposition that would attract customers to the service. It worked, as Steam is now the most popular service out there. Again, the fact that Valve embraces DRM is completely an orthagonal issue and not something tied to the concept of making things more convenient for people.

The bottom line is that the more convenient any business makes their product or service for their potential customerbase, the more customers they are going to attract to the business. GOG has not to my knowledge indicated any desire to create a standalone gaming client publicly to date, but many GOG customers myself included think they would be foolish to not consider making a client in the future as it is an obvious way to make the service more convenient and accessible to a larger audience, in particular an audience that already exists out there and are using competing services like Steam and like it. To provide some of the conveniences that the Steam client provides, to improve upon it in an open and flexible manner, to do so without requiring anyone to use it, and to provide the best DRM-free digital download service out there would only stand to boost and strengthen GOG's business, and would only stand to bring a multitude of more games to the service and to make the service more attractive for many game developers out there who are attracted to the Steam platform for all of the extra stuff it provides to gamers. Granted, I find a lot of that stuff to be useless crap (achievements, trading cards, etc.) but the majority of people seem to get off on that crap, so having any of that be an /optional/ experience for those that like it would only bring more functionality and more games to the table for everyone.

And it doesn't remotely have any effect on DRM.