Isn't it just that the game installs with the same generic license key for everyone, which works fine for single-player but can't work for multiplayer because everyone would then be using the same account. So if you want to multiplay you need to manually change it to a unique key that you can find from your library.

Correct, an annoyance you have to go out of your way to fix like activating a no-cd crack. Same problem with the premium modules which it says you have to pay for rather than having them baked in the installer. Until you investigate and fix it yourself it very much is DRM. Many users will feel 'why do i have to do this? It should work out of the box' Like seeing a friend in 2005 having to edit the VLC sources to fix some header issues with the patch name as 'I shouldn't have to do this' for open and public software.

Is the game playing you? Morpheus†

Unlike earlier generations, modern Info Tech provides sophisticated analytics to capture market participation, and the younger gamers (under forty years of age) are completely inured to micro-invasions of privacy, both of which combine for egregious exploitation. Morpheus† observed the epiphenomenal libido: humanity’s definitive espirit d'escalier and the unquenchable desire for greater integrated layers of meaning (What Ray Kurzweil¹ mapped in six epochs, as we traverse from the fourth to the fifth on the journey to wake the dumb universe). Marshall McLuhan¹ Morpheus‡

Modern gamers are training artificial systems to establish the boundaries of commercial viability; just how much loot must be dropped before a player will no longer follow the bait, and how much loot will create the desired dopaminergic payoff for the player, which grants the game sufficient allure to continue the dance. (Or should that be danse macrabre? :)

Even traditional game developers can exploit these mechanics, which most people dismiss as trivial, as a fillip for their revenues that can then be spent on core IP. Last year, ¾ of all revenue came from microtransactions,² and 18 of the top twenty games of the Australian market had microtransactions.

These revenues are new markets that have been added to the core market (us old gamers, who buy a game rather than rent it). The original market is still here, though now it is niche; it is just a quarter of this new, expanded market, and shrinking. Morpheus‡

Problem gamers, like problem gamblers, are a small minority (estimate 2%) but they are suckers for the loot-box mechanic and rarely monitor their (electronic) purchases. Companies are less than helpful in itemizing their charges, too.

The game developers use misinformation to further their profit; itemized billing is difficult to obtain. For instance, Apple, like the Vatican had for centuries, debits a charge for everything with the one line item —— whether it is Netflix or Fortnite —— which can only be in order to conceal exactly how much a person has spent, and on what they have spent.
Silicon parasites are infesting your mind.

I don't give my data away. I do not barter it. It has a veblen value, inviolate, intrinsic and inalienable.






________
† Warren Spector, et al. (2000) Deus Ex artificially sentient dramatis persona Morpheus, the elder silicon sibling of Daedelus.
‡ Wachowski & Wachowski (1999), The Matrix, Morpheus explained transhuman society to Neo.

¹ Kurzweil (2005), The Singularity is Near.
² These figures are from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Four Corners current affairs programme Are You Being Played? which aired 4th May this year.

________
edit: gorram hyperlink

How would you propose to do this better? I suppose that Galaxy could set it up for you when installing the game online, but offline installers would have to be generated individually for everyone to contain an individual key, or they wouldn't exactly be offline installers.

I can think of some alternatives, but you'd still need a network connection and a login to your gog account, and it would quickly be called out as online drm, especially if you just wanted offline play. And even if it somehow didn't need credentials to log into your gog account to retrieve the individual key, it wouldn't "just work" if it visibly asked for permission to do these cryptic things and it would probably be considered even worse if it quietly called home for it.

It's not even that many a game that does things like this, so building a very complicated infrastructure like dynamic generation of offline installers over it both doesn't seem warranted and sounds like it could provoke outrage over 'watermarking' offline installers. From my library of 464 titles, these games seem have individual serials: defcon, far cry 2, frozen synapse, neverwinter nights diamond edition, neverwinter nights 2, prison architect, quake 3 arena, rise of the triad, the vanishing of ethan carter and tropico 3.

EDIT: Well, now that I thought of it, I grab my games with lgogdownloader and it creates a serials.txt alongside the offline installers from these keys. I suppose that it could work if such a small individual file was being officially offered alongside the links to the offline installers, and the installer would make use of it if its present?

Or just having the key id check removed.... Although hopefully it doesn't use the key as a hash reference or anything for keeping things separate.

They could including an exe which effectively generates a key for you and activates it (either random or based on your username) would suffice and have it check vs the default key when the game first starts before going to the game.

And adding/baking the premium modules as part of the standard install wouldn't be hard at all, first time running (After possible key replacement) generates the new dat files dropping them in premium folder and you're good to go.

And if you don't want to change the key the default hashes are used baked in the game ready-to-go.

Any advancement happened so far?

Apparently no and nothing will for "weeks" and that means never.
We can make noise, but that doesn't work on GOG anymore and it's like that for quite some time.

I remember back in the day, when "many" real "massages from many gamers" on this forums meant something and GOG changed their bad decisions; e.g. when they put GOG Galaxy 1.X install files in every offline installer and after gamers on this forums raised their voices against it, they changed it back, to "old" installers without Galaxy and even apologize.

Sadly, that days are long, long gone and so is DRM-free and clientless GOG!

You can’t even save your progress in Hitman for single player unless you’re connected to the servers. That’s a step much further than the other two.

You can save fine in offline mode. You can't save in online mode without a server check. That's to keep the leaderboards legit, I'd assume, and the challenges and all that.

The real issue with Hitman 2016 is that there's no reason offline mode can't have offline challenges and unlocks without the leaderboard aspect, stored as a separate progression. Well there is a reason, and it's called "get more people to purchase instead of pirate the game," but you know what I mean.

so they just hide until this goes away like with devotion? sad days indeed

Sounds like Diablo 3, Simcity 2013 and Starcraft 2 then... Pretty bad.

Hi scientiae, thanks a lot for your extensive reply. Appreciate your time & sharing will.
I am not sure about the "cohesive interaction of specialized multiple individuals"
Today's world demands expert specialists but I have the opinion
society is running behind providing them.
My guess: Our incapacity to keep the pace of the vertiginous rhythm the technology advances.
Take software development as an example:
While hardware broke the Moore's Law years ago (,,experts finally,, accept it publicly)
software is on its lowest quality and worst moment:
poor performance and plagued of bugs (which are exploited causing the current security cyberwar) and so on.
The situation has arrived to the point the best hope the computing world has is AI
as if it will magically solve all the mess due the lack on the human talent area.
(The lazy nature of humanity on its greatest expression!)
It is not too much to say that I am personally skeptic and do not share the optimism and disengagement.
I see the advancement more like Dumb intelligence than Smart (Garbage In = Garbage Out)
If it is set to a limited scope with clear defined boundaries
with verifiable processes & reversible-results-if-needed, I welcome it (some automation, not all)
but letting AI rule the decisions after its black box processes
and us following blindly the results just ,,because,, it's madness if you allow me.
Before achieving real AI, science needs first to understand what the human intelligence is & how it works.
A quote about AI I found some days ago that deserves some consideration:
"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time" - Terry Pratchett

I like this other one:
"humanity’s definitive espirit d'escalier and the unquenchable desire for greater integrated layers of meaning"

Without a doubt to me humans are by nature a political animal (Aristotle)
with affiliation needs (sorry, citation pending)
The way I personally refer to the "layers of meaning" is "pulverization"
but in my definition is not creating greater & new layers:
Provide only to the working class the false sense of ascension (progress)
while at the same time this "artificially expanded diversity" (steps on the staircase)
pushes the human behavior to:
-A mere savage survival (precarious work, economic inequality)
-An increasing difficulty to assess the reality under an anxious stressful rhythm of life
(urge of excessive consumerism & waste generation, middle finger to the nature)
-Docility (blind obedience to the social contract [Rousseau])
to those artificial pulverizing methods we are under the influence;
directed by whom? well, the very few in the top.

I don't see the -matrix- (society, the staircase) as the enemy neither.
What I see as the enemy is the wrong direction and perverse will of those on the top
in pursuit to perpetually keep themselves there (control & power).
The Dalai Lama has an interesting point of view on some of his books regarding compassion & empathy.

About the rest of your post: commercial viability, microtransactions,
lose the concept of ownership, loot boxes, lack of itemized charges,
the veblen value of personal data (inviolate, intrinsic and inalienable).
I totally agree

About "don't give my data away", well, its really difficult to achieve it to be honest.
A glimpse on it: This article series on Life Hacker
https://gizmodo.com/tech/goodbye-big-five

Now thanks to you, I feel the urge to buy & play "Deus Ex" :)
I hope you kept reading this far and find something useful on it.
A very nice talk and thoughts! Cheers!

You are correct that society is already facing a shortfall in the supply of specialists, like doctors and lawyers. Economic theory tells us that scarcity will make the expertise more valuable, which will provide incentive for others to either part-specialize or transition fully to the new specialty.

Expert Systems will help, here, since they will allow fewer experts to manage larger case loads, and the simpler cases can easily be managed almost entirely artificially, with minimal human oversight, e.g., annual health assessments and conveyancing, which IMHO is the only strategy that may address the chronic supply deficit.
It is reminiscent of the Eastern European desire for capitalism as a cure-all for the want created by the Socialist state, after the fall of the USSR. A good understanding may be obtained reading someone like Slavenka Drakulić (1996) Café Europa, for which she has just released an update Café Europa Revisited. As it is written by the same Croat who survived Tito and penned (1991) How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, it sounds like a useful temper to all the unbounded speculation. (I haven’t read any of her books, just a recent interview she conducted to publicize this latest book.)

Let me provide some hope. When Ford incorporated his car manufactory there were thousands and thousands of other companies making vehicles. What made Ford successful was his early decision to pay for expertise, which attracted the best experts, and then this grew his brand, and then those workers became the early customers able to afford the new vehicles: a virtuous cycle!
Blockchain will have an outsized effect on a lot of this. Think about it: a distributed, third-party auditable, clear and reliable chain of provenance is particularly useful for establishing facts and will revolutionize business practices.
Props for the Terry Pratchet quote. :)
The scariest point will be when we have smart (Generalist) AI. Think of the politician trying to convince people that a particularly costly decision is the best “because the computer says so”!

Isaac Asimov wrote about this (and pretty much everything else) in a short story, which title I forget. (I read it in the Nightfall three-volume collection of his early stories, many years ago.)

As Kurt Gödel proved in 1931, there are truths that cannot be determined by calculation. (Quantum Computing seeks to solve a lot of these problems —— and probably will, eventually —— but that doesn’t mean the “proof” will be comprehensible and therefore credible to us mere mortals.)
Ah, politics. No doubt this will be the close of this conversation. ;)
A lot of these concerns can and should be counterbalanced by systemic processes; typically by advocates within an adversarial framework. (Think of worker unions demanding a minimum wage to prevent the corporation from exploiting a workforce beyond its optimum performance in pursuit only of the cheapest labour.)

Over the centuries rules have successfully tempered the excesses of capitalism; the trick is implementing the best rules because humans will always take any system and exploit the margins for their own gain (capitalist and worker, both) and therefore the process is necessarily a continual adjustment, e.g., including minimum health & safety standards, preventing child workers, etc.

The optimist would say the hierarchy allows those at the top of the technocracy to manage the Big Problems of society (foreign policy, Inland Revenue, school carricula, minimum safe conditions and maximum profit percentages are all areas that can be and have been (to greater and lesser success) addressed in legislation —— always remembering that Economics is not a science, per se, but a branch of (the soft science of) politics) in a systematic manner, whereas the pessimist would note that this separation creates disenfranchised assumptions of care, already understood as the agency dilemma.

That’s the inherent and unavoidable problem of Marxism. When people desire power above all else, then everything is expendable in their quest. This was identified millennia ago (in the Hebrew Tanakh, which was the source of the Christian Bible Old Testament) as a man attempting to serve two masters God and mammon. (God can be understood as shorthand for summum bonum pro publico and mammon, usually translated as money, is equally true of (political) power.) It is a powerful corruption (pun intended) and one that Tolkien, for instance, identified with his LotR Saruman character.
Thanks for the link. I see their largest problem, predictably, was the CDN intermediaries, which act as local caches for the content delivered to individuals.

Remember that the perfect is usually the enemy of the good. One needn’t be totally disconnected from these actors to have most of the benefits. My one indulgence in social media (this website) is a luxury that gives the Google algorithm a glimpse of an idea of who I am. (OK, so I do barter some of my data. :|)

The fewer services of the Big Five one uses the lesser beholden one is to them. Incrementally, this also means that the less you use the less they know and must extrapolate based on other users who are assumed to be similar.

But buying a Google Assistant, Amazon Lexa, Apple Siri, or similar is just asking to be infantilized. (Think of the population of the Axiom in Pixar’s WALL-E.)
I have just reached Chapter X (Viva la France, Bebe!) in my Human Revolution Revision playthrough, so I am right there with you. :D