Thank you for the warning

How do these 'twitch drops' work? I'm not really familiar with them. Someone drops a code on Twitch and there's something built into the game that requires an external account verification to redeem for some in-game items?

While I'm not a fan of Twitch Drops, they're not even the main problem. It's the distribution method once the drops have been unlocked. The fact that we have to link GOG accounts to Twitch, rather than anything else, literally allows CDP to generate offline installers / activators of these Twitch Drops for GOG users and place them in the DLC section. They are intentionally keeping it tied to Galaxy authentication though. That is so PRO-DRM of them.

The subscription gifting rifle is not even a drop that activates via linked accounts. We get a serial key. Can we redeem that code on GOG? No, we have to redeem it on Cyberpunk's website. Do we get an offline installer / activator for that rifle at least? Of course not. Need to launch the game via Galaxy for that.
There are two methods.

The first and most common one is that you find a participating stream, they are easy to find, Twitch itself often tells you which stream is valid for which loot, start the stream (set the quality to 160p, mute it, switch to another tab and go back to doing whatever else you were doing), you then have to watch (or ignore) that stream for some time, usually 2 hours, while building up a progress bar for that loot. Once the progress is reached, you have to go back to the drop page and manually click claim. If you don't click claim, you won't get it. Certain drops are set for different days too. For example, currently you can only get get the pants and the helmet. Chest and boots will start later.

The second method, as I described above already, is the gifting method. You find a stream, select "Subscribe > Gift a Sub > Custom Quantity > 2 > Pay. Then you get a serial key to redeem. This second method must be much newer and rather incomplete. Honestly if they were selling that rifle for $7 as an MTX DLC, I would find that less egregious than paying some random streamer.



Great, there are now so many DRM Rewards that they need a scroll bar.

Kind of, only there is no actual code dropping, it happens in background. You link you account to Twitch account, then watch stream of someone who has drops enabled and these rewards unlock automatically after meeting requirements. Like in case of BG3 it was watching 2 hours of such streams (in total, not in one go).

Not always. There is a code for gifting subs. You get a rifle for that. Diablo 4 did the same thing with a horse. More details in my comment above.

Right now CP2077 Phantom Liberty crashes on start without Galaxy. GOG is trying to fix this but right now this game is clearly DRM'd - even in GOG's definition.

Also past Twitch drops? Oh, potentially quite more games like Expeditions: Rome.

What do you mean by past Twitch drops? If they are content that requires Galaxy and/or a registration to some third party service, that content is DRMed. But if that content is now available in the offline version of the game, without any registration or proof of ownership, then it's not DRMed any more.

I have been unable to spend much time on here and for the moment am not in a position to purchase games...I read the last page or so of this thread and I suddenly feel much better about my circumstances :D

Shows how much CDP cares about both DRM-free and non-Galaxy users, since they obviously didn't even try to put their game on a computer without Galaxy before release...

Thanks for the information. Offline installers are absolutely important to me if GOG doesn't fix the problem within the next few weeks, i will ask for a refund.

The Baldur's Gate 3 Twitch drops aren't available anymore. They were only available for a while in August, but were absolutely DRMed at the time. It's probably the same with Expeditions: Rome and every other game that's had Twitch drops.

For the Twitch drops. Is it fair to call them "offsite DLC not available on GOG"? And, while their implementation is indeed DRMed...

Yes, this is verbal gymnastics. And they're disgusting. And the CP2077 ones were advertised here on GOG. But I don't think the others were?

Mostly just thinking out loud here.

this is messed up, if true. I'll just have to hold off on buyingi until they've sorted all this out.

I am not sure if this works for everybody, but I just managed to get CP2077 and expansion to run using only OL installers. I had to block online access to the executable to achieve this.