as frustrating as that was [and believe you me, it was incredibly frustrating] - it was also at least a LITTLE hilarious at the same time.

this hitman situation is not hilarious. it's just a betrayal of gog's core principles. soooo. kinda not in the same league? :P

I don't think that's worth noting, because I'm pretty sure they were 100% aware of exactly what they were allowing into their store.

There were even apparently comments posted by a GOG employee on reddit or something (I believe they were quoted earlier in this thread too) that said GOG believes games have evolved and devs should be able to sell games how they want and DRM should be allowed so long as it doesn't affect the core experience too much, or something like that.

I'm paraphrasing from memory so my words might be a bit off. But hopefully someone will re-post the direct quotation of what I'm talking about, verbatim.

That is is the kind of statement that indicates the excuse of "GOG just didn't know" isn't a realistic one.

You can find it here:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_hitman_game_of_the_year_edition_11093/post1398

I don't think they are aware that they're damaging their own brand, I think they've lost too many original staff, and positions have been filled by too many new people who only want to make money and who are either simply incompetent at running/working for a business like this, or who have fallen into that trend-chasing mind trap of just 'do what the opposition does to win', or even both. I've seen so many examples of the latter in the last three years around here.

I fear it's like so many who fall into an ideology, so blinkered by their pursuit of one thing that they cannot actually perceive the reality around them no matter how much it is pointed out, and actually start to feel rather hostile towards those who do so. Which would explain why the forum full of dissenting voices is in such a run down state... we're the annoying leftovers of the old guard and all we do is annoy them because we won't just shut up, use Galaxy and consume.

I do not have actual financial data on this but I have always gotten the sense that many of us "old school"-minded people have amassed some of the biggest collections here. So it is a bit ironic, no?

It is indeed.

So.. its wednesday night (At least here in Europe), we are at 82 pages here, 62 pages of negative reviews and a record low score of 1.3 out of 5, even after GoG deleting reviews.

And obviously GoG has said nothing new on this, right? Are they really gonna just sit it up and wait until people gets bored of the controversy? Shame shame, like in that movie whose name I don't remember, shame.

EDIT: It was wednesday, not monday, lol.
EDIT2: I just saw last Chandra's message. At least they are acknowledging it, although nothing more, as the message is completely empty.

Thanks to gog I discovered that in the last few year you don't need to use pirate website anymore to make most games on steam drm-free even if they use the basic steam drm and both are open source... there is goldberg that is a local alternative to the steam api and there is steamless that will try to remove the steam drm... some game only require one, some both, some none (like many drm-free games you can find the list here https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games) and finally some use really bad drm so you will actually need a crack (or you can avoid them since you can get a refund in the first 2 hours of gameplay and you don't need that kind of time to try if a game is drm-free or just use the basic drm that you can easily remove).
Like I remove drm from amazon ebook with a simple calibre plugin, I'll just remove drm from steam games.
I started to use gog basically because I didn't want to use piracy website anymore with too much popup... after that I was happy to support drm-free. But if gog is dead and it's easy to remove drm from most steam games I'll just go back to "NOCD/NODVD".
Also there are many drm-free games on Epic too (many of them use the steam drm on steam).

1 week have pass, and the game still avalabde at store with this online connection requirment,

If you are not going to remove the game from store, then remove the "GOG Introduction" from your channel.
Be fair with your customers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyYW9AOWh-8

And to briefly add on to that point, I don't mean to speak for others but I don't believe any of us were naturally wanting to slow down or cease buying, if not for external factors of course. Pretty sure I have seen multiple users say in multiple topics how they have enough GOG games to last a lifetime, yet would still be buying more. And how often have we seen a Bethesda or an EA sale where users are posting that they would love these companies to release more games here since the users own all the existing ones already! So, I don't think very many of us "zealots" and "grumps" or whatever the next name we get called is, are unwilling to buy more per se. It just has to be after serious changes are made to the way this store is currently approaching things. I will be very interested to see what they have to say about this Hitman DRM situation. So far I have not been satisfied in the staff response.

I have to say that I feel that this had a somewhat passive-aggresive tone to it, let me be clear, the behaviour from GOG has been appauling and the response has been totally justified by the attempt of mis-selling Hitman as DRM-Free. GOGs communication has also been poor on this issue to say the least. The fact this game is still available on the store shows really bad faith from GOG to its customers and its own policies.

Please, allow me to coin a phrase: Nothing has changed, I continue to vote with my wallet and will not be buying from GOG until we get a satisfactory update on this subject, and quite frankly, an apology

Oh dude, I have more games than I'll ever get to play, I have 780 games on here, but If GOG hadn't pulled Devotion, and now done this, I'd have spent an additional $500 or more on here by now. I regularly bought at day one to both support devs and GOG itself as I once truly believed in the service.

I don't know what your ideas are, and what you took away from my post that makes you consider another perspective, but something tells me that you didn't get my point.

EDIT: typo

Could you elaborate about what each does, where to find them, your experience with them, etc.

I was searching info about drm free games on steam when I started to think about an alternative... What if there was something like dedrm for ebook? (I use it for manga since in Italy digital manga are only with drm and it's still the beginning)
I started to search for that and I found out that there are not one but at least two open source project that try to remove the steam drm. They work in a different way but the final result it's the same since you will get a drm free game at the end. Like I said steamless it's an open source program that try to remove the steam basic drm (not ceg), while Goldberg try to replicate the steam API in a local environment so that you don't need to connect to the steam server (it's also good because you will be able to play with friends in a multiplayer game without connecting to a server but only to your friend pc). For this you just need to replace the steam dll and create a stem id txt if not already there.
Of course both of them are totally fine if you own the game and the best part is you don't need to trust some crack that you find online in a pirate website, you can just download them from github gitlab or compile them yourself.
Of course drm free it's the best since you don't need to try anything new, but I don't mind removing drm from a game that I own with an open source program.

I tried it with a game that I got with humble bundle and that was good but that I was never able to make drm free, I had to use both to make it work without steam but it's actually working.
I also tried it with a game that my brother got on steam and it worked for that game too. Basically I think only denuvo and ceg games will fail, but I still need to try it more to be sure.

PS.
https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator
https://github.com/atom0s/Steamless