Thanks, I've added Civ 6 (Under S for Sid Meier's...)
No problem, I don't mind criticism / feedback. :-) If people here feel that having an additional "confirmed DRM'd" list makes it easier to separate "not listed because DRM" from "not listed because it's untested", then I'll see about adding that as a separate tab.

Edit: OK, I've added it and populated the more obvious ones (like Ubisoft's) and I doubt it's complete but it's a start though.

Beat me to it. :P

Wait, am I missing something here? Is that the next suspected game or something?

Yes, there were leaks. After Borderlands ARK Survival Evolved will be given away.

I saw this from their store. Does it mean changes to how the games work without the client in the future?

I don't know.... the text talks about the client checking the games it launches, not the other way around.

This might be due to some earlier complaints gamers had on the platform.

Very early on some people claimed freebies (or they say they did): the client showed it was installed and it would launch, but when they uninstalled the game it disappeared from the library completely. So they hit social media like a vengeance and some issued support tickets over the matter.

So there are multiple possibilities of what was truly going on, from Epic faulting and loosing games tied to an account, to customers being mistaken and claimed the game originally on another Epic account but forgot, to customers claiming they own a freebie but got a copy from their friends, but ultimately the client wasn't checking ownership at launch at that time.

I'd say that's been fixed. If you launch from the client and don't own the installation. It's going to throw an error. This is facilitated by in part the .egstore tokens/cache data in the install dir and what is currently registered with the current account. If you launch the game from the exe and it uses the client API to contact the client it will depend on the game devs what happens. If you launch the game on a client-less system, again it will depend on what the devs have coded as to whether it alerts / depends on the client.

If you are asking whether all games will eventually be changed to using the API at launch (and thus requiring the client to run) then only time will tell. But Civilization VI just landed and isn't exhibiting client integration, so it's not something that's immediately enforceable. Remember that most other platforms have even a very few number of games which don't call the client for launch, so it's going to be interesting if Epic mandates all its catalogue to be client-integrated for authentication purposes.

In any case if this news disturbs you and you have client-free freebies in you account but don't have archived backups of their current state it might be a good time to rectify that.

With all these technically DRM-free AAA games I really wonder what GOG has been up to all these years.
On GOG we're still waiting for Civ 5 and the Epic Store gives away Civ 6 for free and without any DRM, it seems like a joke.

I assume it's Epic's "Fortnite" money at play here, which obviously GOG doesn't have.

Yes, but it's not like Epic is paying them to make the games DRM free, or cares. Absolutely best case scenario is someone at Epic dislikes DRM so they made the optional client requirement default to no instead of yes. Still, the publisher could demand a client check like the Tetris guys did, they just don't.

Lack of GOG versions for games like Batman is probably more rooted in ambivalence than anything else. I think you're basically right, but Epic's paying them to care, more than paying them for DRM free.

Sure. Maybe Epic just doesn't want the hassle of adding DRM or they (and the publisher) don't really care because the game's being given away for free anyway, and the publisher's making at least a lump sum and thanks to what is presumably a hefty chunk of change they don't care that Epic doesn't care about DRM on this title. :p GOG versions likely won't make enough for most "AAA" publishers to get enthused, but at least we're getting scraps.

Stuff like this still makes me question if DRM-free is really the biggest hold-up to GOG getting more "AAA" titles here, or if the bigger issue is the amount of money the average release makes.

edit: oh and 4444 rep too

At this point I also think that the issue of DRM-free is a secondary problem, but as always it's only a money issue. Otherwise on GOG we would have the Batman Arkham and Civ 5 games long ago.

I would of thought so, but I can't be sure as despite owning the DLC for it I've not played it enough on PC to get that far.

I think DRM free is why GOG doesn't get a lot of stuff day one, and I think ambivalence is the reason they don't get a lot of stuff after a year or so.

Ironically that what happened to some regular free games in Steam.