That's because of costs. Denuvo is expensive to license.

Make no mistake, most game publishers see you as a potential thief and treat you as such, especially after actually giving them money for their product. A product that they wish to control so they can turn it off with planned obsolescence and force you to buy the next game, or the remake of their previous game, if you want to enjoy your games. They don't care if you DO enjoy it, only that you keep spending to keep playing. You're a wallet to them, and they will abuse you until you stop paying them for the priviledge. Bo Burnham said it well in "Repeat Stuff" in reference to the music industry pumping out pop hits to take advantage of a reliable, emotionally impressionable audience.

"Ohh, we know it's not right
We know it's not funny
But we'll stop beating this dead horse when it
Stops spitting out money
But until then, we will repeat stuff"

Video (Warning NSFW language)

Not only the grandaddy. But the DRM itself. From where the concept origins. From Simple CD Checks to things like Starforce etc. And sometimes layered.

No, it's a limitation of the modified Inno installer creation used by GoG, which has been improved from the original 2GB limit.

Other threads have covered the pros and cons of 4GB file chunks, but my view is that in the absence of the GoG downloader, the file size offers a good compromise for people using 50Mbps and slower connections (which is still the vast majority of customers). Expecting people to be able to download an 80GB single file in one go through a browser is just asking for trouble.

Unfortunately I think people have a natural tendency to accept the status quo and ridicule those who don't. It might be a coping mechanism, it might be the force that keeps civilizations from collapsing from constant infighting.. whatever it is. things have to be beyond seriously fucked up before people rise up and set out to change things (or you just have to be lucky and get a visionary in charge of things, in a position where they can actually make a change). Hence why most of history is littered with dictators and tyranny, and even today the world has so many authoritarian regimes.

People who were in their teens playing 2000s games are now in their 30s -- those who were preteens are now adult. Plenty of 2000s games (and quite a few 2010s) have already been shut down, generating a little bit of outrage but then business as usual -- nothing changed whatsoever. If anything, the change has been steadily for the worse.

So I don't see any evidence or justification as to why the 2010s generation would be any different and become enlightened and rise up against their corporate overlords in numbers that actually make any difference.

If anything, I think those who experienced the relative drm-freedom of the 90s are the only ones to seriously think it is viable. For the younger uns, drm is the world they were born into. It always was, always is...

I've worked hard for a high speed bandwidth, offer both choices, small break down files and one chunk file. Catering to only part of your customers is dumb.

As for dumb brainwashed DRM masses, unfortunately they were the 65%, today they become the 85%, tomorrow the 100%. By Design.

DRM was a thing ever since mp3 was invented. They pretty soon realised that they had to do something about that development. That's what WMV and WMA were invented for, to offer a way to sell video and audio files that would require a licence file on your computer. Other companies like Apple hat their own system in place for the same purpose.

We can now safely say that they failed the fight but won the war by pushing streaming.

Games are not there yet, but most games will go there. There will always be a niche for DRM free games somewhere, but the outcome of the war had been decided before some of the forum users here were born. Now with "community features" being the next big thing it's not even a question anymore if people copy a game or not but if they can use it at all.
A store which wants to remain on the market, they have at least partially to go with the flow or all the big players will keep releasing somewhere else. The strict "no drm" policy was ok as long as they were 20 people sitting in an office and selling 90s games. If they had no ambitions to grow and just keep doing that, that would be perfectly ok. But as it is, other stores fill that niche as well, so if they don't want to vanish, they have to adapt.

There's just not enough hardliner customers to support a store that offers none of what most modern players want (community bullshit, ranking lists and so on, sharing, streaming, showing off).

And some earlier games before that, where you had to look up an entry in the manual, and use that like a password to play the game. DRM in some form has been around a long time.

Well some folk get easily alienated, especially if they don't get things their way.
I'm not saying there isn't some reasonable basis on occasion, but there will always be dissatisfied folk. For customers especially though, it can be a mix of tolerance and suspicion and expectations not met, but maybe not that realistic either.

Some would have it, that GOG are some kind of evil empire, while others say they are inept. None of the actual facts available support those notions.

GOG have survived for a great length of time really, and so that indicates that must have been doing something right. I don't imagine it has been easy to sell DRM-free, except to those customers who actually care about it, and most gamers don't seem to, going by their support of Steam etc and criticisms of GOG.

And GOG just haven't survived, they've actually grown, and become somewhat of a force to be noted now. That's not saying they have been perfect, we all know they haven't been, but they have done well enough to get to where they currently are, which needs to be admired in this DRM concentric world. Next to no-one thought they would make a good go of it, let alone last this long.

Well, I would call that ARM (analog) or Mixed Rights Management :D, since it's not purely digital. DRM works usually automatically, the licences are granted to a user account (Steam, GOG, Windows User, DVD-Player User).

The term DRM was really introduced only in the early 2000s once these were used to play files / games and needed a - usually - local licence store which would grant the permission to play (windows media player has one such store built in for example). Before that we would talk about copy protection mechanisms which had been in place for at least 20 years already. I remember the Floppy discs which had holes cut out of the surface. The game would then check if there were read errors at the according locations.

This is supposed to be the first game, that had copy protection - and definitly not digital, even if the game itself was of course digital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fko68jYrBKY

Dongles or internet checks could be considered Pre-DRM... DRM.

And Not mentioning consoles.

I remember in my ZX spectrum that there were important AAA titles that added a DRM system into the game cassette tapes. This is, some games were practially impossible to be copied/pirated using domestic tools overall, they added "data blocks" of some kind and it was like a "jammer" when trying to copy the tape.
It also could use to make that loading times (long by default, they were physical tapes after all) were slightly longer, and who knows, maybe in ocasions it could make the game crash when loading a legit copy just because of this.
The copy protection was a type of DRM. It protected their Digital Rights but tried to negate yours, this is, your right to make a backup for personal use.

I know all that, but basically the term, like many words in the English language, comes to mean more.

So DRM for most folk now, goes back to the earliest forms of copy protection of digital data. I guess it's all in the name ... management of our digital rights, whether that be from 2000 onward or before.

I agree on "RM" for some types, not on the generic "D" though :)
Generally speaking, if a copy protection is used to prevent a copy to be made, than it has nothing to do with any licences or rights. The law even back then granetd the right to make personal backup copies

I lived with anti piracy mechanisms all my life, DRM is just a new form form of it.
The type of anti piracy mechanism everyone is complaining about is the game being bound to a personal account instead of something else and the licence checks that require a login.
I personally don't mind that much. I prefer to have it without, but ... meh. What I DO mind however is the constant logging that comes with it. I won't even go into what informations launchers get from my system, but I hate it if a store gets informations about how long I play what. if a platform like Origin or Ubisoft collects these informations, I am also not happy with it, but at least they have the excuse, that it's their game. Other platforms like Steam, Galaxy or EGL don't have this excuse however.

A Physical copy protection relates to the Digital software inside the media, to manage the digital data and how you make use of it.

According to your words Starforce and similars wasn't DRM

Only if you wish to always add the word offline before DRM whenever you are talking about copy protection, as DRM that can't retroactively deny you from using something regardless of how well you had taken care of your hardware and media can't really be considered to be capable of doing any actual rights management.

DRM and Starforce are both anti piracy mechanisms, but these days a lot of people tend to call every copy protection DRM even if that is not how it was defined.
But then again here we also say "Tempo" to all brands of paper tissues (edit: or "Kleenex", depending where you live). And Microsoft ignored for over 20 years now what a GIgabyte is.
The definition of the term DRM and how it's commonly used these days are two very different things.