Thing is, a business is not a "cause". If GOG were to be more honest as to what it's about, that would be a small victory that might lead to something positive down the road. Going with an all-or-nothing approach, considering the current state of affairs in the gaming world, is like going upstream in a canoe without a paddle, IMO.

Cheers.

Agreed.

Like many others, I heard GOG was DRM-Free, which, to me in the time, meant "No launchers or annoyances needed to play any game I buy, just install and play it.".
I started buying on GOG.com because of their Businesses Model. (Their niche) If they abandon the businesses model I came here for, Im out, together with everyone else that agreed to this businesses model and still want it.

Thus it's disappointing when the reason I came here for is being threatned..

That's a reasonable approach, but the problem I am faced with when thinking about it is: How do you know which is which? How do you know which games on GOG have DRM?

For example, Absolver was added to GOG in 2017, IIRC. It was not until 2020, I believe, that I learned that it had single-player elements locked behind an online wall. How was I to avoid buying it between 2017 and 2020?

It's a question of trust. For years I trusted GOG to do the curation, but now I know I cannot depend on them anymore, especially since CDP itself is selling here games with DRM.

I don't have an answer, but I'm not sure your solution is so easy to implement in real life.

For example, A Juggler's Tale was released two hours ago. Does it have DRM or not?

Just for you to know, Unmetal should be drm-free on Epic store too.

Well, Hitman does have a visible warning label with regards to online requirements (albeit incomplete and late), so treating any game like that as off the table could be practicable. Or practicable enough, at least.

Of course, Absolver is lacking such a label, so there's that.

The only thing I'm certain is we all want DRM-free stores for our games, and for many years the best store for us was (and still is to some degree) GOG. I've been shopping here since when GOG was still in beta (and people like me who have lived the out-of-beta marketing debacle know that GOG management is not to be trusted but that's another story). I would like GOG to remain that place but I honestly don't know what is the best solution to prevent things to degrade any further.

Time4Tea said he tried to convince some devs to release their game on Zoom Platform without success, and I don't blame them. Every additional store they have to support is additional work on their part and we all know how many years it took for GOG to be able to convince more than a few publishers to release their games here. And even today, when GOG has more games than ever, there are still a lot of good games, both from indie studios and major publishers that are not available here. For the small indie studios, it's too much work to be profitable compared to Steam and the major publishers well, they want DRM.

That's why I said that I'm unsure if a boycott is the best solution because if we boycott even those games without DRM then GOG will be perceived again as a not profitable enough platform, especially by the smaller studios, to bother publishing their games here while they are the ones more likely to be willing to make their games free of any DRM. And even though we don't agree on the actions we should do, I totally agree with ReynardFox when he say that if GOG fails at being a DRM-free store despite its size, the industry will register the event as "a DRM-free game store is not profitable" and that will be the end of it all. Thus the position I defend.

So what should we do? I have no perfect solution to this question but the simplest thing we could do if it's a brand new game is purchasing it only if we can play right now, if we discover anything problematic in the first 30 days, we ask for a refund, we publish a review to warn other potential buyers. Since we cannot trust GOG anymore to provide us with only completely DRM-free games, we have to rely on a community effort.

Thank you for your reply. I understand your view, but it won't work for me. If I need to research each game I buy, there are in every respect better places for me to do so.

Refunding last 30 days of my purchases. Scummy crap GOG/CDprojekt is pulling. Sucks too because I was going to get Baulders gate 3 on the official release day of October 6th and had my Wishlist of about 55 games

Yong Yea has released a video about GOG's latest screw up, of allowing DRM and threatening censorship: https://youtu.be/JPpOLfECbe4

Sinking to new low gog, huh? The only incentive to use gog over steam is the DRM. You're cutting the branch you're sitting on - think what you're doing to your own business because if I have to cope with drm and look through each game for DRM, I'm going to steam.

I'm not a fan of shopping at several stores, but I'll pounder on it (I guess 2 might be ok). I did read diagonally about itch.io.

Two questions come to mind:
- Does itch.io enforces drm-free or is it drm-agnostic. If it is drm-agnostic, how do they report the drm status of a game?
- I thought that GOG has reduced their original 30% take to something lower as a reaction to the lower take from the Epic store (which is the justification I recall reading for abandoning the world-wide uniform pricing). If so, what is GOG's take at this point?

Not for now then. Unfortunately, the Devotion issue is too politicized for me. I won't re-hash those details again, though I respect your stance on it.

The problem at this point is that the DRM-free pie is not large and it does take a significant amount of salesmanship and some track record to get traction in the market.

It's not just about releasing a technically good platform and then say "Look, I have to nice store, bring your games here".

But yes, GOG needs some competition at this point. At best, they've become lax. At worst, drm-free just doesn't fit in their long term vision anymore and they'll eventually drop that altogether.

Yes, if they could just do that correctly and drop the ambiguity bs, I'd be ok.

Except that, correct me if I'm wrong, but Epic gives a worse experience than GOG when shopping for drm-free game.

I won't go from so so to worse.

The whole point for me is to buy from a store that respects my values.

itch.io is technically DRM-agnostic, in that it doesn't impose any DRM on the games distributed there (in particular, the company doesn't support or provide DRM, which is ine way it differs from the likes of steam), but it doesn't actually prohibit it. On the other hand, the culture there strongly discourages the use of DRM.

(I consider this to be better than the steam situation because steam provides DRM, so spending money there is supporting DRM, while itch.io does not.)

I don't know what GOG's take is, but it certainly is not as low as itch.io's minimum take of 0%. (On itch.io, the developer can set the percentage that the site gets.)

(Note that you should check the description to make sure you get what you think you are getting before you buy, and maybe look at the conversation involved there; some devs are not so nice about their use of the site. Sometimes the demo is available on itch.io, but the full game only on a DRM-encumbered platform, for example.)

GOGs usual take is 30%. This can be deduced from the financial reports. As also can be deduced from these - their costs are too high to reduce that significantly: Currently in H1 2021 their costs are ~114% of those 30%.
I say 'usual' because some publishers are guaranteed sales. This is also mentioned in some of the reports.
In this post https://www.gog.com/forum/general/boycotting_gog_2021/post2870 I have a quote saying they effectively only get 27.3% in H1 2021. Unfortunately I do not know if this - or how much of the discrepancy to 30% - is due to guaranteed sales which did not happen (yet).
My understanding is also that GOG takes a ~30% of CDPR games sold at GOG - this was implied in one of the reports too.

Epic never said they are a drm free store and I think that's the main point of the gog boycott : at least try to buy drm free games on other stores even if they are not 100% drm free.
I say that support the developers that sell drm free games is ok, but I don't want to support liars on gog, while I think it's ok if epic or steam get a share of that money if they sell a drm free game since they did not lie about the drm on their store.
I still will not buy drm games on steam or epic and if I see that I got it without notice I will just ask for a refund or remove the drm if it's easy (like with steamless or Goldberg where the solution is open source and easy like for dedrm with ebook, if I own a game and I can ignore pirate website and use a simple open source dll or program to make a drm version I'm ok with it).
I'm also ok with a downloader if I only need it to download the game and I can make a simple backup that will work offline without the client installed... I can just use inno setup (the same thing used by gog) if I want an installer for backup.

Of course I will try to use humble bundle and itch and zoom before steam and epic as I like to be able to just use my browser. But I'm not against a downloader.
And I'm not ok with lies.
I loved gog and I love to be able to download everything with a browser, but I will not depend on gog when they lie and there are alternative to it (most of the time cheaper alternative, and hitman is a really good example since it was already free on epic).

I learned to not depend on anything because if you do when they change think you will not be able to be 100% free. I learned to use both Linux and Mac because I don't want to depend on windows (and I still use it). I learned to use epic and Godot to avoid be dependent on unity (and I still love it). I learned to never expect anything from a series I like to be able to avoid it for any reasons (for videogames for example if it use drm like always online and /or denuvo). I think still too much dependent on Amazon when I need to buy things online but I really find it hard to find an alternative for warranty support.
I will not depend on gog.

This is the thing though: it wouldn't be a significant amount of work for them to release on Zoom Platform. They have no client, no API to support. There would be no coding work for them whatsoever. Zoom Platform makes it as easy as possible for devs to release their game - literally all they have to do is
give ZP the PC files they already have and they would do the rest. I mean, there is clear proof of that, given that Zoom have restored and released many older games by themselves, without any source access or assistance from the original developers.

This is why I find it so disappointing when I see smaller indie devs not giving a s*** about smaller stores like Zoom. Either they don't 'get' how easy they are making it for them or they are simply fricking lazy. I would expect smaller developers to have more sympathy with the smaller stores, and I will be reluctant to support any that won't.

Imo, we have to send a very clear message that promising for 10+ years to be a DRM-free store and then suddenly reneging on that and betraying your users' trust is not a profitable endeavor. If the industry wants to interpret GOG's failure wrongly, that is their problem. The only alternative is to do nothing and just sit and suck up the increasing amounts of DRM flowing onto GOG, which is not acceptable.