Wow. this is pretty god d*mn awful.

If they don't fix it soon, GOG should offer a refund to its users for that game. It has no place in this store. It is on the same level as Hitman.

I'll try this game during the week and if I encounter that problem, I'll give a piece of my mind both to the developer and GOG.

LOL. It's called stealth DRM. And we all thought GOG really was, as they claim, DRM-free. Uh-huh...

Well, perhaps I'm gonna find a way to stealth my money back too and never buy from them again.

Their DRM will certainly protect their games from being purchased by me ever again. Mission accomplished.

Can't believe no one mentioned FORCED SHOWDOWN.

The game has essential "free" cosmetic content locked online!

Not to mention that the first thing you see when you open the game is a text wall: proceed with Galaxy to access online features (now according to steam reviews, daily quests and the like don't work anymore)! That's right, a game with Linux installers requires GOG Galaxy to access online features that no longer exists!

I just looked up this issue in the linked thread in the Steam forum. It actually seems as if they really did this on purpose so that the game would crash if it could not detect if it is pirated or not - assuming that it is. We all know how devs did these things to prevent pirating in the past. DRM-free is based on TRUST and not on FORCE. So yes, this is textbook DRM. However since a user already posted there that they refunded the game one of the team marked as devs said:

"The developers definitely fixed this one internally, you'll see it fixed in Relics of the Old Faith. "

I don't own the game and I don't know what "Relics of the Old Faith" might be - I only know that I will never in my life support devs who add such functionality like crashing on purpose intentionally in their games. I could not care less if they wanted to prevent pirating with this. This is EXACTLY one reason why DRM is NOT the answer for the pirating problem - it simply hurts the buying customer as well. So I will take a look at the name of the dev to make sure to never ever spend a cent on any of their games. Call it collateral damage for them just as they were prepared to let their paying customers experiencing some collateral damage with their DRM infested game.

Edit: Apparently they also seem to delete comments and block users from posting in it ... just confirmation that these are not the devs I'd like to support.

While the developer's attitude in their responses sucks, it might originally have been an unintentional bug. I agree that these are devs that I don't want to support, and they're way too quick in claiming piracy, but on our side we should similarly stick to the stuff we can prove. We can't be sure it wasn't just a mistake and a lack of testing.

I doubt it. There's been instances of developers doing fun things with pirates. The game Earthbound, for example, was programmed so that if you managed to get all the way to the final boss on pirated copy, the game would crash AND delete your save.

Because Cult of the Lamb is crashing if played offline, and the developer response has been that the game does this if it can't determine if your copy is pirated or not - this is DRM. Anyone that tries to play Cult of the Lamb without running the game through Galaxy isn't going to be able to validate that they actually purchased the game, resulting in it always crashing if you attempt to play it using offline installers.

That is exactly how I interpreted what went on in the thread and not once did the devs say something like "Sorry, it was a bug, we are gonna fix it." which would be normal if it actually was a bug. But of course we can still be wrong with our interpretation ... but like I said, the devs word and actions speak too loud "don't give them money" for my taste.

I did a search and....

Relics of the Old Faith is the official name of Cult of the Lamb's 1.1.1 content update. If you check the GOG forum for this game, someone made a post about getting an error installing 1.1.1 but then it fixed itself. This means that GOG users should have Relics of the Old Faith (1.1.1) and need to double-check that they are running this version.

If they are running this version of the game, can it run without Galaxy and not crash?

Good on ya mate!

I confirmed the issue existing in the GOG version only when I posted the update in this thread (Feb 26). It reports 1.1.4., 3 months ago last update. I opened a ticket with GOG support, but have had absolutely no reply from them other than the automated "are you sure you wanted to open a ticket?"

It's not 1.1.1. The patchnotes for both 1.1.0 and 1.1.1 are in the same news announcement on Jan 18th that announced that Relics of the Old Faith will be coming in early 2023.

I'll credit them with good patchnotes. However, looking through the number of softlocks that got into releases, and it looks like 2 releases were so bad that they had to either roll back after release, I still think we can't be sure it was intentional DRM rather that the dubious honour of "this really could be a mistake".

Well technically CDPR did it too :) . The first version of Witcher had some triggers that made some mandatory quests impossible to complete if it detected a pirated copy. I had the pleasure to experience it first hand, at the time I was using a SCSI CD-ROM (don't ask...) drive and their wonderful DRM detected my original copy as being a ISO image.

But to go back the Cult of Lamb I would say that can put whatever crazy trigger they want, whatever intrusive DRM they want.... as long as they totally get rid of them for the Gog / DRM-free release. If they wanted to protect initial sales or whatever BS then don't release it on day one on Gog. If it's true that it is on purpose, on, a DRM-free release then it's unacceptable and they need to fix it ASAP not just "eventually" when the new version / DLC is released.

I have a feeling that for a lot of Indy devs they release the Gog version with no intention of ever really supporting it, they just release it, get the Gog sales, then let it die and if peoples complains give them a Steam key.

I really find that Gog is not diligent enough with how they handle those kind of issues, here we are talking about the game not being playable at all in offline mode, same for the Fishing DLC, it qualify as a game breaking bug for which there is no workaround and that is specific to the Gog version. That they miss those kind of issues during QA check it's one thing, but for the Fishing DLC issue it is still not fixed months after being reported...

Yes, absolutely. There is no way to verify whether an instance of a digital game is 'legit' or not, without using some form of DRM. The whole point of DRM-free is that the user is not restricted and is allowed to copy it/make backups.

For once, I agree with you. GOG is marketing themselves as a 'DRM-free store' and needs to be doing more to a) properly vet new products and b) boot games that are found to contain DRM.

Wow ... is this really you, Gersen? It is so ... not neutral .... so emotional - quite unntypical - but of course I do agree :)