A daily challenge seems like the sort of thing that by definition carries an on-line requirement, like leaderboards or public achievements.

Renowned Explorers: International Society includes offline, client-less, weekly challenges with its expansion The Emperor's Challenge.

If an indie dev studio could do it, there is no excuse for other devs requiring Galaxy for a similar feature.

The descriptions do sound different though, the one for Renowned Explorers sounds like a random game against an AI opponent, while the Caveblazers one says "Each day a new adventure will be generated! It will be the same for everyone and you'll only get one chance at it!", which is a quite clear indicator that it's generated in a centralized manner, and possibly with tracking of player progress and some indirect competition between players, making it not fully single player content. (Don't have either to check and no interest in Caveblazers to even grab it now anyway, but just going by descriptions.)

OK. According to the game's forum the daily challenges work without galaxy (but of course you need to be online, because they are essentially a multilayer feature where all players get the same daily challenge and compete against each other). But for the leaderboards you need Galaxy installed. But that is acceptable I think, because of you want to compare your score with that of other players, you bend of course to be connected to those other players in some way that allows your identification. So again, leaderboards are basically a multilayer feature, because they don't make sense without other players.

In summary I conclude that caveblazers does not seem to have single player DRM. (Only multilayer features seem to be affected)

Then the description is misleading ;)

The challenges in Renowned Explorers are special objectives with a weekly rotation, not just a regular "random game". And they are not limited to one single try (I would hate that). I did not check if the challenges are the same for everyone, but I could do that by starting the game on two distinct computers.

By the way this game has local, offline leaderboards too. So this is yet another feature that does not require any kind of DRM to be implemented.

Thanks for keeping this updated OP, it's always good to bring attention to these details and keep up with them. I also appreciate actively keeping a number of these appear to glitches which come from them being programmed for steam integration first than adapted for GoG, likely helped by number of these that work fine with Galaxy.

Sadly we have let companies get away with online systems for too long and it's going to be an uphill battle to keep seeing DRM free material.

I wonder if the offline Disciples II: Rise of the Elves installer not including the mini-campaign which is included in the Galaxy installer should count here. I'd count it...

Yeowch. Yes, I'd count that. This sounds like an issue of GOG "unbundling" it in the downloads. It's bought as "Gold", but the offline installers are per-title.

An update for Coromon added a cosmetics shop in-game, if you try to access the shop from the menu the following message displays: Failed to authenticate to CoroNet.

You only get access to said shop if the game detects Galaxy is running.

Yep. A missing campaign in the offline version definitely counts. As long as it isn't fixed that mini-campaign is effectively DRM-ed.

The shop in Coromon that requires you to be online is also DRMed content.

I'll add both games. Thanks for staying vigilant and reporting them here!

Hello,

Coromon is always DRM-Free. The components online requires Galaxy makes sense, for be sure games has been paid on GOG with the account, acocunt linked on Galaxy. Grim Dawn do same.Arkanoid too. For Coromen, daily challenge and cosmetic shop are optionnals, and teh cosmetic shop use only gem from daily challenge, not shop online for buy cosmetic or other. I don't understand the polemic.

So is it DRM-free?

So it isn't DRM-free?

You very much described a classic form of always-online DRM.
Also Grim Dawn does not rely on Galaxy, not even for its multiplayer.

"Microtransactions are an online feature so it's not DRM."

And, BTW, cosmetics *are* game play. "It's just cosmetics" is a bogus argument that people commonly use to try to excuse insidious behavior.

Do people who opt out of the DRMed features have a diminished experience? Well, do you have the ability to use these "cosmetics" when not playing a multiplayer game? It sounds like they do. Thus they do.

Also, daily challenges (speaking of insidious) can be properly coded not to rely on any middleware nor any account, too.

These developers just went forward with the client-oriented approach. Which is why clients mere existence like this is bad. They might not have made any conscious decisions. Steam (et al) is a Trojan horse that continues to make ALL gaming worse by even setting game engineering patterns industry-wide around its terrible DRM platform.

Remember, "DRM-free" means zero DRM. Not "some DRM in some places". This is the same crap for most of the titles in this list, including Cyberpunk. Many of us do excuse explicitly multiplayer activities from the "DRM-free" part (though of course it's better if it's truly DRM-free there, too). But just calling something an online feature doesn't make it suddenly DRM-free, and having only some portion of a title DRM-gated doesn't make it DRM-free because some portion of it is not. (BTW, mental exercise: please draw the line at what percentage, quality, or caliber of content gated DRM is acceptable. The only answer is 'none'; if you allow any, there's no logical way to draw a line anywhere else.)

As for not understanding the Jeremiad, it's because DRM is completely and totally unacceptable. Especially on GOG.

That is an oxymoron. Either the game is DRM-free OR it makes sure that it has been paid for on GOG. You can't have both.