Ah okay. Well, the reviewers didn't pay for their copies anyway. As long as customers aren't getting shafted, I'm cool with that.

Fun fact - Iwiński started in buisness by selling cracked games in high school.

Anyway, CDProject started from importing games and localising them into Polish, they translated for example Baldur's Gate. So no, it started from buying games, translating them then re-selling them, before getting with larger partners for official translation project.

Then came Project RED, and Witcher (which had a long history) and then gOg.

edit- one of the things it was founded on, though was 'added value'. When they bought, translated and re-sold games they tried to add things, little extras, with the games that they sold as well. this at least can be seen in the gOg appraoch of extras as well.

edit 2 - and gOg off course was founded on the Good Old Games principles, more than anything else, where DRM was free was just as much a by product than anything else.

Most curious. If they don't sell DRM copies, somehow i don't see this as being an issue, as the review copy may be say 2 weeks from the final build and it's just a matter of commenting out a handful of lines or maybe the DRM is embedded in the source but you have to opt it in when compiling it. That would be curious.

Though there's also DRM with consoles, might only be the game being signed to run on them which i'm not sure on.

Most media didn't get it, while influencers did, and some of them have been known to take keys or games and sell them.

A curious play... A bit on the level of encrypting something and then giving the key on a specific day/time when they can actually access it.

I'll reserve judgement for now. But it's interesting to learn this little tidbit, maybe one, other companies will follow with.

I'm 100% fine with this. Though I'd be fine if all games had DRM for a few months, as long as it was patched out for sure after that period, so I guess that's not surprising. My main issue with DRM is preservation concerns.

If only that were true. There are parts of the game hidden behind DRM.

Base game may be DRM-free, but there's bonus content that requires you to connect your GOG account to a REWARDS account and then sign into Galaxy in order to activate it. You choice whether or not you consider that DRM.

Hm. The narrative from the Noclip docu painted a different picture.

I have no quarrel with this--the entertainment industry and its hangers-on are a notoriously unscrupulous bunch. Kind of ballsy that they'd shell out for what Denuvo costs and then walk away at launch. But then, as the OP notes, a low six figure sum for licensing and dev time is small potatoes for something as expensive and heavily hyped up as this game was.

That said, I've also got no quarrel with folks calling attention to it (respectfully) to encourage CDPR to remain on the straight and narrow. Remember kids, EA was originally the good guys until they got complacent.

There is one aspect and only one aspect of this procedure that I dislike: It results in Denuvo recieving funding.

under that logic, you still need to connect to your gog account to access any game sold here though. that should be enough to consider gog itself as drm under your logic.

Considering that GOG as a company evidently has no issue selling DRMed games (particularly on the new store app within the optional Galaxy 2.0 client, but also with some Cyberpunk content itself being gated behind online activation, among other examples), it does indeed "make total sense" but that doesn't make it a good practice or in line with past comments about DRM.

Um, no.

Sure, you have to log in to your GOG account to DL your offline installers. But that should be the extent of it.

Let's do a thought exercie if you don't own Cyberpunk (If you do, then try the following): Install your offline installer version of Cyberpunk on an offline machine and tell me how you get those extras? Answer: you don't. Why? Because you have to register your GOG account with REWARDS, then install and sign into Galaxy while on-line to get them.

Still think that's not acting like DRM?

Are you planning to stop purchasing games at gog, then?

Why do people not see the irony/joke in what they've done here? It's pretty sick that people are either raging over how bad it is and is pretty rigid (read grumpy and unchangeable) about it, or that some would sell their own mother just to get it, even if the content is just a couple of non-essential clothes and a weapon, "forged with DRMfree-love".

Yeah, it is DRM, but I have to give credit to CDPR for that one, not unlike the sarcastic/sardonic humour in the game itself actually :D