GOG's original and somewhat current line in the sand is "must have an offline-capable installer". For a lot of Good Old Games that is enough to guarantee DRM-free. Unfortunately in the Live Service world it is a concession that allows too many loopholes such as Sony single player games that still need a PlayStation Account and a half-dozen telemetry services active before they get to actual gameplay. Sony, as a particular example worth flogging, also makes use of the loophole that an anti-cheat rootkit can be installed offline, easy.
I think GOG is saying a lot of the right things in terms of Game Preservation being a long term goal for them. I think they are between a rock and a hard place that the store would be a lot less active if they couldn't offer the latest games from companies like Sony, and they want to be on good terms with such companies to get access to their giant back catalogs for Preservation efforts which also presumably includes sales numbers of recent titles for justification.
But yes, I'd also love to see them push back a bit harder on some of these publishers a bit further than "needs an offline-capable installer" and mabye include more steps towards some definition of "should run offline-capable", because yeah things like "Live Services" and account systems and mandatory telemetry systems and rootkit anti-cheat systems are often de facto DRM just wearing another hat of "user convenience" or "achievement tracking" or "game safety" tools. I don't think GOG can make that push alone, though. There are too many industry trends to try to buck to get further in those directions. (Thinking about the recent Anthem shutdown as a recent for instance of a mostly single player game that is entirely unplayable because EA shutdown live services this month.)
There are no games on GOG which require a PlayStation account for their single player gameplay. (AFAIK, but I think I'm pretty tuned in and would know.)
It was an early complaint about Horizon: Zero Dawn, especially but not uniquely, on GOG. Sony did walk that requirement back several months after the complaints started, but it wasn't directly because they thought they violated any of GOG's explicit policies, it seemed more directly due to the user complaints and review bombing on Steam from what I saw.
To be clear: if you buy Disco Elysium on GOG, download the "offline game installer" without using Galaxy, install it, and run the game on a desert island, it will work (the network requests fail open). But if you try to run the game after removing the bundled dylib/DLL, it will not.
Why do Galaxy-free games ship with a mandatory dependency on Galaxy?
> Why do Galaxy-free games ship with a mandatory dependency on Galaxy?
Because the developer linked the dynamic library in at compile time instead of writing additional code to load it at runtime and disabling/enabling features based on its presence.
You can call it budget limitations, incompetence or lack of respect for the customer. Doubt it's intentional DRM though.
Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)
Off the top of my head Crime Cities on launch forced me to use Galaxy to play it. I vividly remember this because the game also ran like complete crap.
Galaxy can be required for multiplayer aspects in games, but if what you say is true for the singleplayer part of the game, GOG will consider it a bug, and will get it fixed.
There's nothing in the Crime Cities GOG forum about this, nor in the various tracking threads in the main forum, and generally GOG users are extremely sensitive about anything which even reeks of forcing Galaxy, so I'd strongly expect any issue to be known.
I've seen cases where the developer implemented a bad online check, so that if you blocked the program from accessing the internet while the OS reported being online, the game would hang or crash, but being fully offline would work. Could it be that something like that was at play here? Oh, or that you simply picked the wrong installer for the game, and thus ran the Galaxy-installer rather than the offline installer?
I think too it can be misleading since on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE (which works entirely without Galaxy and how I run games).
They do this to push Galaxy for convenience I suppose as most are used to clients that handle updates but it can be confusing if some wonder why for instance their offline installer shortcut opened Galaxy instead.
If the wine experience is anything to go by, if you don't have Galaxy installed at all, the shortcuts will also just point to the .exe - but yeah, I suspect it must be something like this.
> on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE
I had Crime Cities lying around since it was a freebie on GOG many years ago, so I just went ahead and installed it using vanilla wine. There was absolutely no Galaxy requirement for installing or playing the single player part of the game.
Not quite. You can use Galaxy to download the offline installers (or just do that through the website), but when you install a game through Galaxy, it downloads a special build which it just copies to the right location, without running a separate installer.
The running game can also call out to Galaxy and unlock, or not unlock, ingame content based on what it hears back. It's pretty difficult to imagine a definition of "digital rights management" that doesn't include this.
As far as I remember, the only games which optionally need Galaxy running are those will online multiplayer, and only if you want to play online. This is because the original developers shutdown their own servers for matchmaking or originally used Steam servers for that. GOG servers are only replacing those.
There are also a handful of games which put some additional purely cosmetic content behind an online check. That could be the start of a slippery slope, which people are justly upset about, but they then do an injustice to their cause by generalizing from those cases.
It's not a slippery slope but already full blown DRM plain and simple. Both online functionality limited to GOG-run servers and checks for cosmetic content.
Note that for Gloomhaven, the multiplayer server is one of the players' computers. That player hosts a game and everyone else joins. There are no GOG servers and no company servers.
In version 1.0 of the GOG release, multiplayer is enabled.
In subsequent versions, multiplayer is disabled (in the sense that the button to host or join a game is greyed out) unless the game succeeds at verifying you through Galaxy. (And this is a dynamic status; you can have it enabled, shut off Galaxy, restart the game, and find that it's disabled again.
Which ones? Honest question. I only remember games for which GOG apologizes in their store page for missing cosmetics or extra features because originally tied to online services (e.g. the Mafia or Yakuza games), or ones in which they are unlocked by default for the same reason (e.g. Dragon Age Origins).
> if you talk to anyone in canada who is from here and doesn't work in the public sector, the conversation quickly turns to whether they're planning to leave and how far along they are. the way it's going, they're going to have to bar the exits.
It sounds like that is just your bubble. I live in Vancouver, BC, and am a Canadian citizen. Yes, lots of people agree that things could be (and should be!) better - but I don't know many folks that are actively planning to leave.
Truth. Third party software for trackpad. Third party software for mouse. Third party software for window management. Third party software for Spotlight replacement. Third party software to support a second external display.
The third party software is really good, but come on, Apple, take a hint.
That's basically the problem of today's Apple, and it won't get fixed because they have an incentive to let the 3rd parties fix those problems (they win both by taking a cut of software sales in the app store and selling more Macs while costing less dev money).
I doubt anything is going to get fixed, and Apple's hardware crown isn't as strong as before. But they like selling "services," so...
This is partly because of the culture of hacking the GUI started back in the 80s with original Mac OS. Extending the OS beyond base capabilities is fun, but Apple also is usually selling an 'as is' experience like a high end chef. You can add ketchup to your stake, but they aren't going to do it for you.
And, as I said, I really only needed the software once I got an (ultra)ultrawide monitor, and it could be the info it is sending is also non-standard in some way.
I'm not going to claim that every compositor/WM handles high DPI well on Linux, however both KDE and Gnome on Wayland are fine in my experience. I actually find that KDE on Wayland handles mixed DPI better than Windows, macOS doesn't really give you enough control to try.
> That's how I feel with programming, and sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see so many of my colleagues using AI not only for their job, but even for their week-end programming projects. Don't they miss the feeling of..... programming? Am I the weird one here?
I've played with using LLMs for code generation in my own projects, and whilst it has sometimes been able to solve an issue - I've never felt like I've learned anything from it. I'm very reluctant to use them for programming more as I wouldn't want my own skills to stagnate.
https://www.gog.com/blog/what-exactly-is-drm-in-video-games-...
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