TL:DC

Saying over and over that someone has not bought enough to have a valid complaint is not a challenge. It is trolling. For those of you that the Hitman decision was your only problem with the direction GOG is going, good for you. It is good to see that folks can be easily soothed. Until I can buy a game on GOG knowing exactly if any type of DRM is in the game (missions, weapons, multi-player) without having to wait for reviews or finding out through another 3rd party I am staying on the list I currently reside.

My hope is that GOG gets it's act together, but my expectation of that happening is very low.

I said add my name to the list

He hasn't updated the list for about a week.

Please keep my name on the boycott list, Time4Tea. Clearly our work is not done yet. o.O

I'd CERTAINLY like my name added too

1) That would be illegal. Mediation and negotiation are all closed table not public court. The courts have to be public so judged and staff payed by taxes don't get an excuse to be corrupt, but private negotiation has no such thing. It's unreasonable to say that every private negotiation between parties, corporate or otherwise, should be a matter of public record.

2) Contracts and negotiation. GoG would be frankly not be served by being openly combative moment one. IO abused GoGs terms to rush in a DRM locked game by loophole. Sure GoG could go in with "you ugly liars, remove this at once!" but that would serve nothing. To deescalate things and work to compromises, like offering some capital to pay for developing an offline system, since it is possible IO may be just trying to hide it doesn't have the money to fix this. Working together on public marketing for the DRMs removal to give IO incentive to put money into changing the game(since it would be significant development.) But if you go in demanding the thing be solved by day 3 or removed, then it's not helping anyone.

3) This is a repeat of number 1.

4) While in concept I agree with you, you are one of those people who has demanded the online system in Warcraft 3 is no different than Denuvo and that Gwent as a game, and by extention all MMOs, be removed immediately. I don't underhanded crap like using the word DRM in a very clearly different definition to GoG and your opposition and then continuing to pretend anyone not in line with you is just crazy or stupid. You can start demanding "all DRM" when you stop comparing all non-lan multiplayer functions as DRM.

5) This is a problem of the original page 1 post, that is entirely on Tea for not including. If you're going to refer to an event or happening, you have to actually detail what it is, or provide some kind of reference material. Because I'm sitting here going "the fuck are you talking about." Given there is a very active list for supposed DRM(I disagree with chunks of that list) I find it very difficult to believe games on here are locked behind DRM. Agreements to sell games produced by Epic Games does not mean they will all require Epic Launcher, if that's the direction you're going. 6 is a repeat so I'm skipping it.

Now, only point one and two have anything to do with Hitman. Four, five, and six, have nothing to do with this and have no such relation. It be stupid for them to even mention it. Your standards are ridiculous and selfish. If you want to run a company, then go make one or try to be part of GoG to change it from inside, but demanding the public get to play spectator sport to every meeting GoG has that is high-profile enough is just childish.

And yes, they made a great response. It was short and to the point, made no extra excuses, and didn't try to virtue signal or make grand promises about future activities, and they didn't go after or blame anyone for it. It is a fine response, nothing shakespear worthy by fine.
Um, or they removed it because they realized it was crap and instead of removing it day 1 and attacking IO they tried to negotiate and get IO to develop and offline UI and progression system? Because they know IO can jjust go to steam and be fine leaving GoG behind. You know, give companies a reason to work with GoG over Valve without just burning the bridge with aggressive ideological demands? Dude, when someone does something praiseworthy, demanding your suspicious they did it for malicious reason, is kind of a dick move. either bring hard evidence, or just let people receive praise for doing good things.

Wow I didn't think that I would be requesting to removed from the boycott list so quickly, but I said that I would like to be removed when GOG removed Hitman from the store and they actually did it.

There's still a lot of issues GOG needs to work on, and I am still going to prioritize other DRM-free stores over here, but I would like to be moved back to the sympathetic list.

It's not often we get a win, so we celebrate now until the next time GOG messes up.

Hi everyone! Sorry for the radio silence - I've been exceptionally busy over the past few days. I have updated the first post list to reflect the recently-requested changes and have moved those who requested it over to the sympathetic list.

I agree it is great news that GOG have removed Hitman 2016. It is a good sign and a step in the right direction, to see that GOG is willing to listen to its customers and take a firm decision to keep DRMed games off of their DRM-free store.

I think we can count this as a limited victory, but there is more work to be done. It represents a single battle won, but the war is not over. Speaking for myself, from the point-of-view of my own boycott, it really just takes us back to where we were about a month ago, before Hitman was released. GOG has taken a positive step in the right direction to reverse the decision to release Hitman; however, that decision should never have been made in the first place.

There are still many items on the boycott issue list that have not been addressed: the other games on GOG with locked single-player content; the locked rewards in Cyberpunk; and of course, Devotion still has not yet been released, despite almost 10,000 GOG users signing the wishlist request. GOG also seem to have stopped short of a full apology. I would personally like to see them reaffirm their commitment to DRM-free and make it clear what they intend to do to prevent further missteps like this in future.

However, I see this as a very positive sign that GOG is willing to listen to its customer base and will respond if enough pressure is applied. In this case, they have again tested the water to see if they could push the boundary of DRM-free further, and their user base has emphatically said: "No. We will not accept this." This clearly shows that large-scale protests by GOG's current user base can be effective and achieve results. This also proves conclusively that those who have been saying since the start of the year that customer action won't achieve anything, that we are too few and they won't listen - they are wrong. Period.

I'd like to thank everyone who has taken part in the boycott this year and everyone who has stood up to GOG and protested against the release of a DRMed Hitman on GOG. This result was only achieved because of pressure from all of you and you are the ones who deserve the praise. My boycott is going to continue for the rest of this year, as there is more work to be done. At this point, I am considering offering GOG an olive branch and buying 1 or 2 things in the January sale, as long as there are no further 'missteps' this year. However, I will otherwise be continuing my boycott into next year, until we see some meaningful progress on the other list items.

Thanks again for your support of the 2021 boycott! :-)

I would say it's slightly better, actually. With many controversial changes/features in the last few years the modus operandi for GOG was to scale things back slightly after about two weeks, so they could address community complaints while still largely pushing through what they wanted. So far this is different. They've openly identified their misstep as such and completely went back on it. I would consider that an improvement.

As far as my spot on the list, I think I will have to wait and see how my spending develops, since that's what made me jump on the list in the first place. However, I'm more or less in the same boat thinking about getting a few games in the near future. Whether this was an honest mistake or back pedaling on a calculated approach to test the DRM waters, rewarding the outcome to show customer intent and hopefully the profitability of DRM-free could be a productive approach I would think.

GOG will simply do the same thing later again. They push the boundaries until they get away with it. There is no commitment anymore. They backed down from every promise to get more marketshare.
Here is news for you GOG: when you aren't DRM-free anymore, why do you expect to be around anymore? You backed down on one world, one price already. Why should I use a subpar digital distributor? Steam is FAR more convenient and there I get the most recent updated game, the biggest chance to get a reaction by a guy from the publisher or game studio and it's far less hassle. So what is your point in even existng if your whole sellingpoint is void? Yeah, Exactly.

the funny part is that GOG will never get more marketshare with their overinflated regional pricing

I'll admit I was surprised. I thought GOG was just about ready to either completely scrap or seriously scale back its drm-free policy based on the fact that other venues were perceived by management as way more lucrative.

Time will tell if that will become the case later on, but for now, I misjudged things.

That being said, while the community is united at the threshold of significant single-player content being drm-free, I do believe it is fragmented enough on other issues that you won't reach the critical mass necessary for a successful boycott for anything beyond that.

For example, you care about Devotion and I don't really. Similarly, I care about multiplayer and from what I read in your post, you probably don't care about it that much.

GOG.com should change their byline to Single Player DRM Free because they cant control multiplayer aspects because of its always online requirement

They can't force devs to support drm-free multiplayer, but they haven't exactly gone out of their way to support or promote it.

They could have made drm-free multiplayer a seamless extension of their Galaxy bindings, but they opted not to (and if they had, maybe those Galaxy bindings would have become desirable for some, instead of something we avoid like the plague).

They also are very unclear about the drm-free status of multiplayer in their game descriptions, except for a couple of cases were they claimed that "only" LAN (ie, no Galaxy) was supported. I think that makes it pretty clear what their stance is on that.

I agree it is a more encouraging sign than we've seen recently. I think it is also encouraging to see the strength of the user backlash over Hitman. It gives me some hope that there are still enough users on GOG that care about DRM-free to be able to apply pressure and hold GOG accountable. That we are not simply an impotent 'vocal minority', as some have suggested (the level of up-voting we saw on the Hitman reviews is imo a strong indication of that).

Yes, I agree it could be productive to offer an olive branch and reward GOG's positive actions, rather than just criticizing and protesting the bad. Carrot as well as stick and all that. Yeah, I certainly wouldn't point a finger at anyone who feels that a purchase or two is justified in response to GOG doing the right thing re. Hitman. And imo, that is kind of separate to people's longer-term stances, in terms of boycotting.

You are right that different users have different priorities and not everyone agrees with every issue on the list. That is why I have tried to focus more on single-player DRM than MP. It's not that I don't personally care about multiplayer - I do. In my personal opinion, GOG's DRM-free promise should also apply to multiplayer games and I do consider a multiplayer game that requires a 3rd-party account and a connection to a centralized server to be DRMed.

However, I see single-player as a higher priority and, as you say, it seems there is more widespread agreement on that than MP, where the views seem more fragmented. It's great to see the GOG community coming together to draw a clear line in the sand on single-player DRM. Seeing off Hitman is great start, but we need to keep pushing for GOG to address the other single-player DRMed games.