Yeah, the "DRM-free store" introducing DRM into their games, profit off of DRMed games from another store and banning games on the say-so of chinese communists- how could anyone have a problem with that?
rollyeys.gif

I agree with all your points in the OP and I'm with you in principle.

I might be a bit too heavily invested in GOG to go for a 100% boycott myself.

However, I will be drastically reducing my spending on GOG, and buying few games from them, until if/when they do all of the things that your OP lists (which sadly, I don't expect they ever will do).

Like ARD above, I agree with everything the OP said, and am with you in spirit.

I turned down a few hundred dollars worth of games in the last sale event and I won't be buying anything from GOG any time soon, but I also might be too far invested to give up entirely and I really, really don't want to have to go back to sailing the high seas to get games. If I do decide to buy here again, and this is still a big if, it will only be when A. I feel like I'm at a dead end regarding choice, and B. said game is heavily discounted.

But whenever I find an alternative to buying here, I'll now take it, and if some site can somehow take up the mantle, I will dump GOG like the flaming bag of shit it's become.

On the other side, by continuing to post here, he keeps the spirit of boycott alive and may come to convince others to join. Nobody would know of the boycott otherwise.

If one sees in the street one kid bullying another, one could say "I hate bullies, so I'd better walk down another street", or one might actually try to stop the bullying (and get a black eye in the process).

I'll say one thing. If a random user starts using my forums or my social media posts comment section to call for a boycott of my company or my products, I would ban that user in a hear beat. Clearly GOG is a lot more tolerant.

So the issue is really that it is an MP game with an alibi SP part (aka tutorial).

Well, tough call. Ideally the MP part would require no client - problem solved, but sadly that's not fashionable anymore...

MP only games with a client requirement can't be called DRM-free in any meaningful sense. So "the SP"... 30€ for a tutorial, that's all what pure offline players get. The rest is "leveling up for MP" as you wrote, and thus tied to playing online.

The game doesn't really "fit" here, I guess. On the other hand, it's perhaps a good game (for MP) and some people are probably glad they can get it here instead of The Other Place...

I guess one problem is that in more and more games the borders between online and offline get blurry, like Dying Light, Dark Souls, No Man's Sky... and the online parts will always require a client because that's just how it is. And GOG has to make a decision on how to handle games like that.
Stripping them of their online components just for the sake of "100% DRM-free" feels silly, because nobody gains anything, and the people interested in MP stuff lose out and buy Over There instead. Not releasing them at all means there's no DRM-free version available at all. Releasing them as they are angers the DRM-free fanatics. And convincing the devs to not make games like that? Good luck with that.
^This.

It's interesting how everyone criticising GOG gets downvoted now. The same users (and quite a few others), saying the same things before were all getting their posts high rated. So... what happened? Did so many people leave that there is there only a handful of us left and the rest are GOG fanboys blindly downvoting any critique? Is there a particularly devoted sycophant with an army of alts? Or did so many people change their mind when they saw nice discounts over christmas?

Either way, it is pretty pathetic how this forum went from at least having the balls to recognize and bluntly speak about GOG breaking their own rules, profiting off of things they used to describe as unethical, and finally supporting communits censorship, to outright attacking those who aren't ok with all that.

I guess the Blizzard strategy of just waiting the storm out and letting mindless fanboys come to your defense works for everyone.

i think it is more that people go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about it. in the end, it becomes spam

It's not like GOG is shoveling GWENT down in our throats. The game is just here for those who wanna play.

I don't see a problem with this.

Not really into card games but I'd be more likely to try Gwent if it doesn't need Galaxy.

"They can't" --- that statment is sheer BS. There is nothing whatsoever at all to stop GOG from releasing Devotion.

The only reason why they don't is because they shamefully cower in fear over potentially offending the CCP; and that is not a legitimate reason.

I, too, am not spending any money nor recommending this store anymore, so I'm with you.
However, I do not fully agree with your point 4.
The Devotion debacle was the last straw for me.

I would argue that if someone really hated GOG, they wouldn't want to actually come to the site and use it.
Generally, when you hate something you are disgusted to even look at it.
In this case, most of the users who are complaining have more of an ideological or intellectual problem with GOG, but that's not really enough to hate something. The service they deliver is still better than their competitors in many ways, so these users won't actually quit the store until that service actually becomes unusable.

EDIT: I guess to add to that, when you make threads like this it is mainly to incite some sort of rebellious response. These sorts of "forced" boycotts rarely work from my experience. The only boycotts that work are 'natural' ones that happen because people just don't want to buy a product anymore or use a service because it's bad or annoying.

EDIT2: Nothing against OP btw, I don't have a problem with this thread, I just think it'll ultimately be completely ineffective.

True, Boycotts of this type rarely ever work.

When Steam first came out many wanted to boycott it due to the DRM and bandwidth usage at the time, however it became the biggest PC vendor and led to the fall of physical PC games. For a large amount of time it had a stranglehold monopoly and PC sales were more or less forced to use Steam as many people felt "No Steam = No Sale"

Many people have attempted a boycott of Activision/Blizzard but as we can see this has had minimal to no effect, (Hell Activision makes more money on Micro-transactions than actual game sales), they even tried to hold a protest at Blizzcon but very few people showed up and it barely got into the news.

However something to keep in mind is that if GOG did fall because of this, companies would say "See this is why DRM-free doesn't work" and then push DRM as vital for the industry.