There is no publicly traded company that is a decent moral entity, period. Its an illusion woven by clever PR and marketing gimmicks.

A publicly traded company is controlled by a collective of people out to make money. It is their mandate and the fact that they are a collective normalises the behaviour of the company toward the goal of making money.

If you want mostly moral, look for a non-corrupt government, non-profits or the rare company that is controlled by a benevolent dictator for life (most likely a smaller company).

btw, I'm 99% sure that GOG is DRM-free not out of general principle, but because it is a niche were they can exist and be profitable (Steam and some big name alternatives with their down exclusive content have pretty much cornered the rest of the market).

Your relationship with GOG is strictly a business relationship. You have money that they want and they have products (DRM-free games) that you want. Look any further than that and you'll be disappointed.

I think they can restore the lost trust it will just take a while because of so many things that has happened to them. What they need to do is fix Cyberpunk and release Devotion. Give a way a few games for free like the Wticher 3 for a limited time for example.
You are 100% wrong. From my understanding Cyberpunk ran fine on the PS5 and the Xbox series X and it was only the PS4 and Xbox-one versions that suffered any performance issues. Also there have been all kinds of bugs reported with the PC version which plagued several users. Yeah you may not have had issues but saying there is nothing globally wrong with the game when there is reported issues is just ignorant. What lost trust how about them lying and covering up the performance issues that plagued the PS4 and Xbox-One versions of the game. How about them asking reviewers to use game trailer footage or stock gameplay footage when reviewing the game.

Um Yeah they did, They rushed out a game they KNEW wasn't ready. They even violated Sony's PSN policy about announcing that everyone that wasn't happy with their purchase to ask Sony for refunds.

They must support Devotion and Detention, and they must make good on promises of refunds and fixes - promptly. If ANY of those are missing, I think CDPR will take a long-term hit and not regain its previous reputation any time soon. That reputation was not easy to build, but very easy to destroy with the choices they've made in the past month. They should have known better.

FFS, what did i tell you, the DESKTOP ICON AUTOMATICALLY SETS a PATH to launch it WITH
Galaxy, it is like that since they pushed 2.0 and yes even the offline installers do that (as far as i know)
Rate me down all you want, everybody claiming GOG sells DRMed games is just WRONG or doesn t
understand WHAT DRM actually is.

if you guys have ANY doubts about DRM on gog, do the following steps pretty much as @Slick_JMista
said already.

1. Download offline installer (if you insist)
2. cut your internet
3. install the game
4. execute the game via executable in the game folder (you may send that to your desktop)
5. cut all running galaxy services

if your game NOW is fully functional, installed and started without internet or galaxy, then you
can be pretty sure it is DRM free

and YES that is how i test the DRM free thing, except that i just do it after i let galaxy install them.
I still wonder why ppl insist on that since years.

However, what i said stands at this point CDPR just has to rethink certain decisions and even
some processes of decision making within the company itself. Given ofc they care about
"being the good guys" and even if they can get back to the former reputation of being a customer
friendly platform / company, i think that the CP77 launch and Devotion thing ll be remembered.
As for CP77, i believe some reworking is needed, starting with the UI and AI and then the nightlife.
But we ll see, as for the devotion thing, ye just release/ bring it back to GoG.

The world economy is likely to go down the toilet long before this lawsuit with CDPR is resolved.

If your lost trust is with CDPR, you are completely missing the point

You think so? The trust CDPR has build up, was build on "OLD" community members.
(like me and others, yes my join date is still wrong ever since the merge of forum and gog accounts)
CDPR did made decisions that were risky, but customer friendly. See selling DRM free games.
The thing is, over the last few years, decisions were made, that eroded this trust.
It pretty much blew up with CP77 launch, not because expectations weren t meet.
Because it shows so clearly that this GAME was rushed, to meet the decision "money ppl" made.
Not the gamer, in my "circle" NO one absolutely NO ONE "DEMANDED" a pre X MAS release.
I d rather had a MAY 21 release with all the features and good KB /M input as well as good AI we re
missing now, than this rushed release just to get the X MAS money in.

Let alone the cost of good will CDPR just burned through, with this. They aren t a "little polish dev"
anymore that can be forgiven a messy launch like it was back when W1 was released. They are
a "big boi" now, they earned a reputation of high quality games with extreme love to detail.
They just burned through that, with that release, as well as other decisions see "Devotion".

I mean, it says a lot when i tell you CDPR was the only company that managed to make me
preorder, in 30 years of gaming ever since Berlin Wall fell. CDPR were the ONLY ones that
earned that much trust, which (by now) is pretty much gone. I am sure every pre 2015 community
member feels similar right now. I rly don t know what can be done to regain this.

Yes, I think so. Most companies change management frequently and you are an unwise consumer to have placed such an unrealistic level of confidence in their brand. If you want to be an early adopter, go right ahead but don't complain if you gave them money yesterday for a game today and you don't like how it turned out. And in full disclosure I have bought cyberpunk 2077 today

Have you tried that with Gwent? If not, please give it a try and let us know how that works out.

You are correct that most games on GOG are DRM-free. However, if even one game contains DRM, they cannot legitimately claim to be a '100% DRM-free store'. 99% is not 100%.

First off, aren't you an optimist :P. But on a more serious note of a side-note, I doubt it. Regional economies, sure, they might be affected if things go south - the world economy, not so much. Because it's a fickle thing that can be kept on life support with the right nudges. And rest assured it's going to be nudged if it gets there.

What people don't generally realize is that an "economic collapse" doesn't look like a lot of people no longer having any money and being out of jobs - it's people still having money, yet it being worthless due to shortages in produce. Essentially, famine and infrastructure breakdown. Think the current GPU market applied to every day stuff.

Let's just hope we won't get to see it in our lifetimes, eh?

Problem with that is that nowadays, a lot of software download extra free dependencies (as in free beer at least) from the internet that are not bundled with said software, most often due to license constraints, but also convenience.

You can circumvent that by pre-installing said dependencies before installing the software.

So, just because an installer is not 100% offline doesn't mean that the software isn't DRM-free (just that you have some extra work to do if you want the 100% offline experience).

Never bothered to check if it was the case with GOG installers, but most open-source software work like that out of the box nowadays and its hard to get freer than that.

Also, Linux installers don't use Galaxy at all and I never bothered installing GOG Galaxy on my Windows gaming console (*cough*, I mean computer, *cough*) and the "backup" installers work just fine.

Not sure why you are quoting me with the installation order/process here. But my argument for CP 2077 was that you are missing out on the DRMed Galaxy-only goodies if you dont have Galaxy and just use this sequence. (And bolded the relevant parts.)

Far as I know the original founders are still the biggest shareholders and still have the big management positions.

Maybe try explaining what you actually mean? That goodies are goodies (and not food, housing, DRM or whatever else) is obvious and irrelevant to the discussion. My point was that the goodies are DRMed.
Far as I remember (based on reading some post about it - dont know if this is true) the goodie data is even included in the offline installers but cant be used without the Galaxy activation.

After the Devotion issue and the lie about it (followed by silence), I:
- Refunded any orders from the last 30 days (first ever refund)
- Deleted my GOG wishlist
- Didn't buy anything in the sale
- Made sure I spoke about this on social media.

I won't be buying from GOG again until they sort this out (or CD Project games like Cyberpunk from another store).

As others have said, I have enough games to last me a lifetime already here, on Steam, and on Itch (probably hundreds that I haven't played yet). For the first time in two years I bought games in Steam's Winter Sale (and none in GOG's). Steam is shit and I know it, so I have low expectations and am not disappointed. Gog seriously disappointed me.

Unless this gets resolved I'll go back to how I was a few years ago and get all my games on Steam (if heavily discounted, to make up for the DRM) and Itch (full price if indie and DRM-free).

I've no idea how to get all this alienation noticed by the people at GOG who have the power to change anything.

It's weird how a company can have a super-loyal customer, and via a number of bad decisions that they double down on, make that customer so angry that they lose all their goodwill and will no longer recommend them or support them.

Well, yes and no...

No, you can't tell the day-one or "day-minus-one" (pre-order) purchasers to not complain. They put their money on the table, and what go they in exchange? If anyone among the CDPR fanbois has - or had - a reason and a basis for complaints, it's them.

Yes, they should have been less smitten with the company and acted reasonably instead of pre-ordering or ordering on day one. Waiting for the product having entered the market and having been reviewed before making a purchase decision would have saved them from disappointment and subsequent complaining without trading any drawbacks for it whatsoever.

As you said, consumers are unwise. It's not going to change. Yeah, an unwise consumer might eventually learn and cede being an unwise consumer, but then again, there is a new sucker born every minute. Whaddya gonna do?