Hey, I'd like to be able to play games when I'm away from the internet. Sometimes the internet goes out for no reason, maybe I'd like to take a laptop out into the wilderness and play, maybe there's no reliable internet and having offline backups is a reasonable thing to do. Maybe I want a straight cut game that's not bloated with what is effectively spyware. Maybe I want to back up my games in case the apocalypse happens and twenty years from now we can raise our children on these COM-PYOO-TER GAMES and say "This is what we had in the before times. While you kids are waiting for The Elder Scrolls VII, we had five of them, all ready to play, not needing to feed the biomass receptacle our flesh in order to play for six hours at a time."

Online services die, sooner or later, no exceptions (same on species or our solar system, the difference is in the scale), and do take away everything on. It doesn't matter if "offline is outdated" or not, this is irrelevant against the problem. How can it be not understood? Nothing else in the galaxy can save from the death of an online service, only keeping offline copies of data that are not requiring online by design; Offline backups are a necessity if you yourself respect your own investments, your own time put to get the money to pay for, and do not want it to be lost. This is that simple and this is why I do backups in 2022, in 2021, in 2010, and so on.

Let's hope GOG will stay afloat and the installers will be available just fine and work well in the upcoming years.

Many of us currently want that, but alas we are very much in the minority.

I really feel we are in phase of the digital always online revolution, where we are still lucky enough to some degree to get games for permanent offline use. The way things are heading though, we are only going to get smaller as a group, and eventually lose any bargaining power. GOG if they want to survive, will eventually need to change their model, that's pretty much a given. GOG are really just a store, and the majority of customers and DEVs and PUBs really have most of the say.

In reality, what bothers me most about DRM, is not so much the online requirement, as the overhead from any DRM scheme, aka Denuvo for instance. Just another layer that impacts your gaming experience in various ways.

Maybe future customers of GOG, will stream from GOG. In a sense with Galaxy, they kind of do that now when not downloading and installing the Offline Installer version of a game. Perhaps in the future, folk won't even install a game to their PC or device, just see the end result on them, playing via a server somewhere. You sort of do that now with multliplayer games, to a lesser or greater degree depending on the game, and of course you do it completely with browser games.

Ever faster web connection and more powerful PCs and devices, will likely continue to dictate what the future looks like.

Going forward, the best we can hope for, future wise, is that we can still install on our PC or device, for offline use. That means knowing what you want before hand and installing it. So long as their is no obligatory online check before playing, then that is a tolerable situation most of the time, so long as you are well organized and there's not some hiccup with your machine.

The ones DRM harms the most are the legal users: The folks of the Seven Seas can, do, and will disable or render DRM into not preventing running offline and not rarely not doing overheads. When a real DRM Free version on GOG is not available, by doing more and more outlandish things, the tops drive people to sail as well, not only in the form of a protest but not rarely for performance reasons and other reasons, including when there is no demo. In my view, instead of doing more harm, the tops must stop DRMing stuff, offer legal users better service than the Seas do.

DRM is certainly an impediment to legal customers, you won't get any argument from me about that.

That's not to say that many users get noticeably impacted by it, as for many it is kind of seamless, and they are just continually moving onto the next new thing. So it is really mostly when you want to play again, perhaps years away, or offline, or are having some issue that needs troubleshooting, where you can then feel the full impact of DRM.

I have mostly had to deal with DRM issues related to ebooks. Kindle and Kobo ebooks have a disappearing cover issue that for some reason they cannot solve or don't want to. To get around that, you can strip any DRM and side load the ebook instead, and never sync. You do lose all the benefits of syncing though, and you go to some trouble going through the manual download process, stripping drm and then side loading. You also need to be careful, at least with Kindle, over what version you are using, otherwise you cannot strip the drm. So I have paid all this money for expensive ereader devices, only to have covers not appear for some ebooks. Sometimes you can get the covers back, only to have them or others disappear after the next sync. Then I have had issues with the odd ebook refusing to copy to a device due to a flaw in the DRM scheme, where some aspect has failed to modify correctly. I've even had the odd structural issue with an ebook, which can only be fixed with an editor, necessitating DRM removal first and then side loading the resulting ebook.

DRM is definitely not user friendly, and in reality is a false protection for providers. And despite the few bad eggs, trust is the better model for all parties.

You will BOIL eventually, little frog, you willl boil like EVERYONE, in the water of SOCIETY, heated by the flames of MARKETING under the cauldron of CAPITALISM to feel the mouth of BIG DATA and fatten the belly of COMMODIFICATION on the dehumanizing chair of destiny which already creaks under the weight of consumption to collapse with the force of indifference over the shattering crystal of nature as the shards of global warming will slice the fat of mankind into chaotic morcels of warring chaos and despair.

FUN FACT, frogs will jump out of water if it gets hot enough, but I assume the enforcement class that is our chef will put a metaphorical lid on the pot in order to hold us while we ribbit to death before being served to their masters. You see, the chef is a well-paid slave to the rich customers that shape his world, and the customers demand frog legs or else will get them at another restaurant, thus leaving the chef with less money to pay his rent and extravagant lifestyle of snowboarding and drugs that distract him from the fact that he is a high-class pawn, laboring to please his masters who will abandon him for other chefs. Thus when we frogs jump out of the hot water without a lid keeping us trapped, we are now enemies of the chef and the customers. We have abandoned the hierarchy that demands our sacrifice and legs, and, by hopping across the kitchen, have now become pests to exterminate. The chef will not tolerate this, as it is a health code violation and a risk that his restaurant will be closed by the other enforcement class operatives who will abduct him and keep him enslaved if he continues to defy their health codes. What will you do then? Hop or boil? This is why we need DRM-free software! To hop out of the clutches of a rent seeking society!