I can't help wondering what's going on with Square-Enix game releases on GOG.com.

Clearly Square-Enix is not against being DRM-Free completely since they have almost 30 titles that are already being sold on GOG.com, but for some reason we can't get the same Final Fantasy releases that are on Steam?

What's the deal?

I am one of those people who will never buy Steam games, but I can't help feeling frustrated by the situation. Final Fantasy IX is being released on Steam [soon], yet there's no word on ANY Final Fantasy releases on GOG.com?

I realize that GOG.com is working hard on the situation, but is there any hopeful news that this will happen some day?

cause final fantasy ( the good ones anyway ) are the money makes for square enix so they prefer to hide them away behind layers of drm

Companies that still believe in DRM amaze me ... if there was only a minority of individuals who believe in being DRM-Free, it would still make it worth their while to release it without DRM because people like me will not buy their games if there is DRM ... but the same cannot be said about making it DRM-Free. No one is dumb enough to reject DRM-Free games. It's a win-win situation. Piracy is now virtually a non-issue, so DRM has become utterly useless. How does such a large company miss something so obvious?

Seems to me that most Japanese companies don't care about DRM one way or another. They just wanna keep making that money so they can afford the 30,000 yen per month broom closet they call an apartment.

uh me thinks you just awnsered you own question
large companies are oblivious
lets keep in mind that square enix called the sales figures of tomb raider 2013 dissapointing and this was a game that sold to the tune of 4 million copies

or more egregious sega has been making bone headed move after boneheaded move for nigh on 22 years now
occasional flashes of brilliance followed by what the fuck are they doing ??!!
moving exclusively in to mobile and freemium gaming for example same goes for konami

I think this pretty much sums up every video game developer on earth ... =)

Don't many (most?) of those newer games or remakes require a login to Square account, or somesuch?

That's why those games are on Steam and not on GOG, as Steam/Valve doesn't really care if the game has third-party DRM or logins to play the single-player game (on top of logging into the Steam account), while GOG does.

The same deal with more recent UPlay and EA games, they require UPlay or Origin account so don't expect them to arrive to GOG. I think EA doesn't sell its latest games even on Steam anymore, they want people to use the Origin service for their EA games and that's it.

Oh well, can't win them all.

well a lot of big companies are short sighted myopic and tone deaf
squeenix is just one of the worst
that whole ff 13 debacle for instance i can only speak for myself but

ff 4 doesnt require any login to a square account

ff 7 does

ff 8 i cant recall but i wouldnt be surprised if it does

ff 13 doesnt

and EA threw their toys out of the steam pram around mass effect 3 since then their pc games are confined to origin

From my understanding, Squeenix sees GOG as a dumping ground for their old Eidos catalog. Yes, they have a presence in here, but have you noticed how they don't sell a single "proper" Square-Enix game, only the Square-Enix "in name only" titles they acquired when they bought Eidos? That is to say, the classic Tomb Raiders (the new ones are likely too "high profile" to be on GOG), the Legacy of Kain series, the classic Hitman titles and some other games (Total Overdose, Revenant, etc). Every single Square-Enix game on GOG is basically an Eidos game, which makes me wonder if GOG even has a deal with the "real" Japanese/worldwide/central Square-Enix, or only the Square-Enix branch that used to be Eidos Interactive.

To be fair, though, it's not as if I'm complaining about this arrangement, as I honestly prefer the classic Eidos catalog to the overrated Square one (I do love me some Enix but mostly their SNES titles, which will never get a PC release).

I wish Hitman Blood Money is considered classic enough by Square-Enix to be finally released on GOG. It is almost 10 years old, so...

Oh, and I have a Hitman DVD collection of the first four games, Blood Money included. All DRM-free. Do they perhaps sell it somewhere else DRM-free?

That's actually 3.4 million retail copies (that's EXCLUDING digital sales!) in the first three weeks, the best performance for any Tomb Raider game ever. It sold more than 4 million retail copies in the first 6 months. By April 2015 the game had sold 8.5 million copies in total, making it the most successful Tomb Raider game in history...

Long story short: Square Enix are idiots.

because they expected and wanted call of duty level sales
and tomb raider doesnt have that sort of popularity anymore

and they repeated the idiocy by making the sequel an timed xbox one exclusive

Never had, actually...

it had enough popularity to have annual games from 1996 to 2001 and then people started to realize it was the same damn game over and over again
an the creaky old engine that looked "great" in 1996 didnt look so hot in 2001 anymore

then angel of darkness dropped followed by the first reboot 10 years ago

but square enix is remarkably tone deaf ie the ff 13 trilogy