Posted July 04, 2015
Gede: And I don't think I'll be giving GOG any more money until I know that they can own up to their mistakes.
Didn't they own up to this being a mistake? To quote Ciris (post 183, at the top of page ten of this thread, with my settings): Ciris: We apologize for the inconvenience - this is a situation that should not have happened. You are of course entitled to request refunds for the game due to this situation.
Further, they're apparently getting a GOG-specific build made, as mentioned in the same post: Ciris: We've asked the developer to create a custom build for GOG in which this is prenatally fixed, unfortunately it will take some time for that to happen.
I find this to be a pretty reassuring response from GOG. (I'm not sure of what "prenatally fixed" should be taken to mean. Perhaps Ciris meant to say permanently fixed? The fact that a separate build is called for might indicate that the DRM is being stripped entirely for the GOG version, which could well permanently fix the issue--but, as indicated, this could well take some time to do.)
As to the issue itself, while I agree that this was a misstep by GOG, and that it was a bad idea to use a universal key that could be deactivated by the developer, to my mind this issue isn't nearly as alarming as it seems to be to others. Nor does it do much to shake my trust towards GOG. GOG is run by people: mistakes are likely to slip through every so often.
The basic idea of simply denaturing a piece of DRM--such as by providing dummy DLLs that simply report "all's well" to the DRM no matter the circumstances--seems quite sound, and rather more feasible than actually carving the DRM code out of every game. In this case the specific implementation was perhaps poorly thought-out, and backfired, but I have no arguments with the general idea as a means of dealing with DRM, nor with such games being sold as "DRM-free": to my mind, they're effectively DRM free, which is sufficient.
As to GOG having been aware of the potential issue, I agree that they perhaps handled this less well than they might have; I get the feeling that they thought that the problem was solved, and didn't anticipate the developer blacklisting the key again. Additonally, we don't know what discussions went on between them and the developer--perhaps the developer has been resisting any further fix than the "universal key", and had previously reassured the people at GOG that another blacklisting wouldn't happen. (If a further fix involves stripping the DRM code and creating a separate build for GOG, then I could easily see them balking at doing so.) GOG could have refused to carry the game at the time, but now that they have it, pulling the game from the shelves--especially with a temporary fix in place and a (hopefully) better fix coming--seems to me like overkill.
Post edited July 04, 2015 by Thaumaturge