One thing however I noticed when playing with the launcher. The game seems to support Achievements on Epic. Makes me wonder if more games will now add achievements and because of this maybe break DRM-free.

It is sad possibility. I always felt that lack of DRM is rather a side effect of a missing features of the launcher than a feature of the Epic store, it is a good idea to back up the games from the store.

It's possible. The only reason GOG offline installers of games that contain achievements don't crash is because the game contains a galaxy.dll "stub" that silently handles API calls from the game to the client (when the client isn't running) to basically "pretend" and acknowledge back to the game that it's unlocked something. Normal for GOG because offline installers exist as a core feature, but for Epic / Steam games running without a client is more an unauthorized bonus and there may be no such offline "epic_api.dll" to handle offline calls. Worst case - the morons encouraging Epic to be exactly like Steam for adding achievements, etc, succeed, and Epic Achievements then become expected / normalized and a much higher percentage of future releases will not work without the Epic client running.

My other long-term concern is the similar previously mentioned issue of "unified code for cloud saves" that offloads the whole save game mechanism completely into the client to "simplify" doing a combined Epic / Steam / Galaxy release and in the process also breaks client-less functionality (no client running = game won't save, even locally). There's already two games on the list (Journey & Alien Isolation) like that. Hopefully it's another "requested feature" that won't become popular...

Achievements should be built into the game itself anyways.

That way, you can earn them for any single player modes/campaigns even while offline & not connected to service; and/or can bypass any DRM/client-app non-sense to be needed to run in the back-ground.

And then once you go online and connect to a service, then it should upload what you've earned for Achievements over to the servers.

I do agree but in that case it should also be possible to turn them off for those who don't want them.

I'd be fine w/ that as an option too.

I don't like DRM, so I prefer to have games without it ... especially if I am paying, but free games no problem.
However, I do make a rare exception for some special ones I want. That said, I don't go out of my way to increase the likelihood of that, and it is generally just a game or series I have been into for a good while. So something like Tomb Raider or Half-Life or Far Cry, where it seems unlikely they will come to GOG or any time soon.

Like many others I have been grabbing the free games from Epic for over two years now, and at some point I earned a coupon, and had in mind that if ever anything suitable cropped up I would buy it at Epic as a kind of thank you, but I wouldn't go overboard doing so.

Anyway, when I grabbed the last of their Xmas daily free games (Jurassic World Evolution), a message popped up saying my $15 coupon was set to expire in about 7 days. Last I noted, it wasn't as high as $15, so it got me thinking I should see what I could get that was suitable. The only catch, was that whatever game I bought had to be $22.99 AUD or more.

So I did a bit of a search at Epic in that price range, and didn't come up with many suitables, except one and maybe some possibles.

The one I came up with was Far Cry: New Dawn, which was $23.xx. Then I noticed the Deluxe Version was slightly cheaper, so I checked that out. After awhile amidst other distractions which kept popping up, I decided that seemed a fair deal, so put the game in my cart. However, it would not let me use the coupon, and it took a little while to register why - $22.94 wasn't quite $22.99 .... bugger.

At that point I nearly gave up. Anyway, I am a stubborn bugger at times, so I decided to check out the other deals related to that game, to see if there was anything that might be suitable.

There was a deal, that included Far Cry 5 for around $30.99, which I did not have yet. That seemed a strong possibility, but I liked the sound of the Gold Version of that instead, however that was an additional $9.xx. So I did some further checking. The Gold Version included 3 DLC's I liked the sound of, plus some other stuff, and they were all part of the Season Pass which was part of the Gold deal. Checking out the Season Pass, I saw Far Cry 3 was listed as being included, and I did not have that yet either.

So I pondered and pondered and then finally made a decision to buy that bundle, which I got for $24.19 AUD. That seemed a fairly good deal, any DRM aside. It would please my sense of fairness in regard to Epic, and so another box ticked.

So there you have it, another rare DRM (probably) purchase by me ... though if I am really lucky they might be like some of the other games at Epic, and DRM-Free.

Three great sounding games and lots of extras.

P.S. Now just watch them be released at GOG some time this year, and wipe the smile off my face ... ha ha ha. ;)

Not DRM-Free - IIRC they're uPlay (Ubisoft client) keys / link the games to a Ubisoft account

No worries, thanks ... I'd not really looked that deeply into them yet ... nor played any of those free games I have been getting from Epic, and only installed a couple so far .... GTA V obviously etc.

This year for me, will hopefully be The Year Of The Gamer.
Will undoubtedly mean less reading, watching, coding, browsing, chatting, collecting, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGUF0gqQnek

I've started zipping up a few more games and I won't be updating them anymore. No big deal, none of the (free) games I have there are 'recent'.

I was under the impression that GOG games installed with Galaxy should work without the client. So how does work then, do the Galaxy-versions include such DLL stub as well?

As far as I know yes, Galaxy downloaded GOG games should in general work without Galaxy and the builds they download are identical containing the same files. Those galaxy.dll files pass on an Achievement Unlock event, etc, through to Galaxy if Galaxy is running but also silently act like a "failsafe" if it isn't. Some Epic & Steam games are different though in that they may call their client directly (with the store-level expectation that the client will always be running / launching), and crash / malfunction (eg, not save) if it's not running.

This is one of the reasons where if possible, it's best to test this by downloading on one PC then testing on a 2nd completely client-less PC to observe if the game works without any client installed at all using just the files installed in the game folder. It's also why to me games on this list are just a "bonus" if you can get them to work, and why I'm wary of calling games on this (and the Steam list) "DRM Free just like GOG", when the one thing that separates them is GOG does provide a guaranteed client-less "fail-safe" whilst Epic / Steam do not, and adding things like Achievements to Epic could break client-less operation for future games (as it seemingly has with Alien Isolation) in a way that GOG's offline installers seem designed to handle by default.

Ok thanks for the explanation. This is exactly why I consider it important that the store of my choice supports DRM-free officially, so that I have some leverage if they sometime failed to do that.