Digital Rights Management is technology designed to prevent the duplication/distribution of copyrighted material. GOG Galaxy is a client for installing, playing, updating games, including on-line facilities. You have assumed, because GOG Galaxy contacts a cloud service (OVH) as part of it's online suite, that is must be DRM. Wrong.

as wa said this is for checking for updates, recording playtime, etc.
The stuff people that use galaxy actually WANT :-)
If you don't want this just don't use galaxy and it is gog.com business as usual.

No other developer will do this, so if you like the game BUY it, support CD Project.

unforutnatley it broketed, as my playtime has been stuck at 16.5 hrs, really i have like 24 maybe idk. i cant always launch thru galaxy or sometimes i forget.

so, i will never have an accurate record of the insane # of hours i end up spending w/ this game.

I am still not comfortable with how things are at the moment. I have re-installed TW3 while not having Galaxy (or the left over services upon uninstallation) on my PC.

witcher3.exe will still try to connect to the said server (and according to my firewall it is the only program on my machine which calls this server).

Now what happens:
1. Witcher3 executeable is blocked from Internet
2. Witcher3 cannot be run as it will crash
3. galaxy.dll (a component of a software I never installed in the current cycle) must be renamed or deleted, else the game won't run
4. The game will now run but not without throwing an error that galaxy.dll is missing (the game runs in a way not anticipated by its publisher)

Definition of DRM:
"The protected files will not play on computers that have not been authorized"

What is witcher3.exe trying to accomplish by contacting a remoteserver using a component which I didn't opt-in to use?

The first thought which came to mind:
It is DRM!

What if it is not DRM?
UDP 514 (According to the IANA it is a well known port for syslogd)

What would they want to log on my system and push it onto their syslogd? My playtime, achievements, cloud access? I have not opted-in using such services (Galaxy isn't installed).

What if they are not using syslog on UDP but another service?
This would be a violation of certain RFC...(not as serious as Skype by grabbing 80 and 443 to operate through firewalls but still...)

All of these possibilities reek from the head (at least in my book) and come unexpected as I always had high regards for Gog and CDPR because they always were quite upfront with what they are doing...

It is what Galaxy is supposed to be: a community tool, with achievement stuff, friend list and so on. For that functionality, online connections are needed.

If the "authorized" part came in anywhere, when would that license activation/key entry have been? It can't be DRM; it neither registers you, nor does it stop to work if you block the connection. Worst case it could be "spying".

(Just the IETF perspective here: we don't like it, but the RFCs are not legal norms, they are technical standards, and especially some of the Big Players ignore them all the time. So not that much of a big deal.)

I see where your concerns are coming from, and I too am unhappy with what I think is a messy dependency on their new Galaxy service.
However, you will find that in several areas of the game, there are parts that haven't achieved a clean state. Not exactly a rush release, but not a well-polished either. Many players are hoping, some waiting (without playing) for the patches that will fix these issues.

I do think what you encounter there is not result of bad intent, but result of an less-than-perfect Galaxy service integration. It's worth filing a bug report issue over, and actively asking GOG=>CDPR to fix this, so there is a version completely without Galaxy.

After all, that's part of the Galaxy plan: Never required.

Mostly, yes; then there's friend list, chat and achievements.
BTW, there's a "disclose the Galaxy protocol" item on the wishlist. All of you in this thread may want to support it (or even the "Open Source Galaxy" one).

Agreed (on "there is no DRM").

I've been thinking along these lines too, and I'm pretty sure the "no DRM" policy will stay. It's what sets them apart. Even if they ever wanted to (which I very much doubt), GOG couldn't give this up without losing big time to Steam.
So I'm confident in this regard.

Edit: added links to the wishlist

You can uninstall GOG Galaxy and the game still works just fine you know.
I had no need to delete 'galaxy.dll', I just uninstalled it to see if the game still worked and it did indeed.