i'm going to take this a bit at a time.
groze: Why can't GOG be trusted, though? Because they made a couple of big mistakes throughout their run as a company? I see your forum tag is "Sierra gamer", did you boycott Sierra when they had Daryl Gates working on their Police Quest/SWAT games? Sierra made A LOT of questionable decisions while they were pushing out games, but they're still viewed as a "good" company, overall. "Good old" Origin, who people blindly love, all the while accusing EA of being evil, wasn't all that good, but I guess people's memory is selective as hell. Origin basically sold voice packs and "expansions" that amounted to a level or two for the price of an entire game. But all these companies can make mistakes, they're given the benefit of the doubt -- as they should, mind you. GOG can't, because... "principles" apparently only apply to GOG, no one else.
i will be fair here and say that i was a much younger person then, and the daryl f gates situation was WORLDS away from where i was.
either way: i didn't much care for the tone of police quest going forward, so i stopped buying in when i read as much as i could about pq4.
my feelings: re: sierra soured somewhere around 1995. [for various reasons.]
one of which was the gutting of qfg, which - up until that point - had been developed a quite specific way. with the release of 4, it became evident to me that whoever was at the helm of quality control at sierra wasn't doing a particularly good job. [there were MANY bugs in the release version of that game. my favourite - and most comical - was that the draw lines weren't properly handled, so your guy could just float off the edge of the screen and vanish forever if you let him.]
i tend to agree with you re: the origin situation. i never much played their games, though, so it was never - strictly - a problem for me. [though i dearly love u4 and think it's one of the most notable stories in a game so far.]
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as a now-older person, i think it's important that companies - if they have principles - stand by those principles. gog isn't doing that. that makes this situation problematic.
groze: GOG got greedy, I'll give you that, and I do think Hitman GOTY should be removed from the store ASAP (assuming GOG still has any leverage with IO, seeing they probably had to sign countless NDAs and contracts and all manner of legal BS), but game release threads of indie/smaller devs are not the place to "bother" GOG with that. You have the Hitman thread for that, or the countless fear mongering threads you overzealous slippery slope fallacy conspiratorial people have already created.
this is two separate thoughts. so i'm going to deal with them that way.
firstly: absolutely. the hitman debacle is a debacle and it does need to be cleared up.
secondly: you may not think it, but i mean my posts in good faith. i am NOT here to rain on a given developer's parade. i am merely here to help other customers figure out whether or not the games have something in them that would prevent them from buying those games if they have those principles in mind. [eg: drm free.]
i am - strictly speaking - not here to bother "gog" [because i doubt gog can be moved towards honesty at this late date.] - and i certainly do not intend to bother the developers - their lives on release day are generally already weird enough as-is.
rather, i would prefer it if we - as users - could help each other.
to that end, while, yes. "i have the hitman topic" to ask about this, i also think it's worth noting the drm free situation of each game as they become released, here - now - precisely because gog won't be moved toward doing that themselves.
groze: You're clearly not looking out for each other, you're just posing this same loaded question in every single thread, trying to twist it and claim you're just "fighting for your rights", all the while you already managed to scare at least one customer away from an awesome game just because they were not a native English speaker and got confused by your "crusade".
this is...a lot. :)
i'll try and break it down a little.
it's not my intent [and never has been my intent] to scare interested customers away. if they're interested, that's cool. i want indie developers to thrive, because i think that's actually where the most interesting part of gaming is, at this late date.
to that end, i welcome [and would appreciate] people asking questions about the game and hopefully, they will get good answers to those questions.
a fair question - then - is also "does this game have drm?" it's a fair question precisely BECAUSE gog cannot be trusted to label the games correctly anymore.
if a non-native speaker of english is confused by that, then i [and i suspect many others] would be more than willing to try to explain the situation to them in a way that - hopefully - makes sense and clears up their doubts about the game in question.
groze: We know what you're trying to do, so, please, at least be honest about it and stop trying to spin it around. You're mad at GOG because of one game, and that's fine, but stop flooding every single smaller dev thread just to ask these obvious begging the question fallacy questions. At least you're trying to be nice about it, unlike some other dudes in here that will outright start offending both devs and forumites, but what you're doing is still pretty crappy.
unfortunately, you are now attributing malice to me and i intend none.
my requests for information are just that: good faith requests to help people make up their mind about whether or not they should buy the game based on their principles.
for at least some percentage of the user base here, their principles include drm-free as a sticking point.
is a game drm'd? then they won't buy.
i'd liken it to "is/will the game be available as a linux build?" it's a fair [and valid] question.
[though, on the latter, at least gog has been kind enough to label when a game is playable on a linux distribution.]
i generally see no malice in people asking about linux builds.
in the same way, i intend none by asking about the drm status of the game in question.
you are right. i am...unhappy with gog and that is why i am persistently posting into each thread, because - naturally - gog cannot - now - be trusted to be upfront about the status of each game. so it falls on us - unfortunately - to figure out the status of each game as it is released.
if the developer could help out in that regard, that's great [but not expected.]
groze: You don't go around stabbing people and and apologizing afterwards thinking that makes it alright just because you feel you're "fighting for your rights". Most of these devs poured years and years of their lives into their projects, and you just crap all over that because of a mistake they didn't commit. Let them have their games on as many stores as they can, be happy that GOG is supporting indie and small developers, and lets them sell their games on their store, DRM-Free. And, yes, all of these games you've been shamelessly trolling (whether you feel like it's trolling or not, it's still what you end up doing) are DRM-Free on GOG, I hope this answers your "oh-so-legitimate" concerns.
here again, i agree. [after a fashion.]
i want to see these developers succeed. and i want to see them succeed in a drm-free environment that can be trusted to have ALL of our interests at heart.
that means:
i want the developer to succeed.
i want the players who buy their games to enjoy those games.
i want - whether you believe it or not - gog to succeed.
but that environment can only be cultivated if gog sticks to their principles.
that they're not is unfortunate.
from that perspective, and though you may be arguing it, it is important that i "fight for my rights."
if i do not then i lose access to a reasonably decent storefront.
while i don't trust gog at this late date, i do /appreciate/ that they are in the market and i hope that they make less bone-headed decisions.
i am frustrated at gog precisely because i want to see them succeed AS A DRM-FREE venue.
groze: Have a nice day, hopefully you find something better to do with your time then to try and sabotage indie dev games.
well, that was a pretty barbed closing statement :P
you may note that i only spend some of my time here. i have other things i do between checking into the gog forums :)
anyhow, i hope you have a good day, also.
lostwolfe: pardon me if this feels like a troll, but it is absolutely not.
if gog cannot be trusted to do the work of releasing drm free games anymore, then i think it becomes imperative that we, as users, look out for each other and actually vouch for the games.
[of course, if the developer would be so kind as to swing by and vouch for the game, that would be extra good, but at release time, developers are under immense stress and i don't particularly want to add more stress to their lives.]
[edited a little later: one of my sentences just felt a bit wonky and i re-worded it a little.]
thefallenalchemist: You do this on a DOS game and I'm punching you in the nose.
duly noted.
though to be fair, some dos games DID have drm:
i remember attempting to make backups and having to use copy_ii_pc to get that to even work, because of the way the developers wrote to the sectors of those disks.
