I'd wager that CDPR has zero interest in loosing their customers base and I do truly believe that a Cyberpunk online can co-exist with DRM-free games. Right now we haven't had any interestinf released on GOG for quite a while so anything that draws more customers is needed.

This “we don’t have anything interesting” comes up every month or so. The thing is they have released a lot (considering it’s holidays too), fact you don’t find it interesting is by the by. Personally I have not seen anything that would even go on my wishlist either. But they are still pushing new stuff out. As for CDPR losing customer base, they mostly have, all these attempts to get more customers has pushed out the old customer base, and it hasn’t got them anywhere. They get a lot of refistrations, people buy a game or two (Witcher or cyberpunk) and then go back to steam for cheaper prices, better setup, and bigger library. Gog cannot compete with steam and epic on library and prices (simply put the others can give things away, and don’t care about devs drm policies). They need to compete on the one and only selling point drm/online gated/online only/etc. free games. But there likely isn’t enough money in that.

Rockstar working on singleplayer DLC for GTA V is laughable. They havent worked on DLC for RDR2 (despite huge demand for it) and even ignoring Red Dead Online because it doesnt make as much as GTA Online. Not only that, they outsourced the GTA trilogy (their flagship) to a company whose expertise is in portables so they can continue churning out new content for GTA online. GTA VI is also probably not coming as long as GTA online continues to remain profitable.

I hope this is true but two things recently got me to doubt this is the case.

First, people dont care about DRM and love steam. Its sad but many steam users are convinced that steam will never go out of business because its "too big to fail" and even if it does, "good guy steam" will make every game "DRM-free" so they can all download their libraries and play their games even if steam closes shop.

Second, steam and streaming in general have undervalued games imo. Its so easy to build a library of hundreds of thousands of games that most people dont bother to complete (a study estimates that only 20% of players bother to play any game to its very end, let alone do stuff like 100%). This attitude naturally leads to gamers not caring about any single game so even if steam closes shop and revokes their license and access to it, they probably wont care that much.

I do hope many people still care about ownership and thus choose to value DRM-free but this might not be the case.

The problem is also that some developers also choose steam above GOg and thus the version on gog is missing things. And some would just never release on gog. Next to that GOG isn't entirely DRM free anymore, not like about 6 years ago. With Galaxy CdProjekt just have their own Steam. When i joined GoG it stood then for good old games and that was also what they had. But things changed.
I have Steam myself and i also have Origin, Ubi Connect and Rockstar Social. I have quite a catalog on Steam and i'm aware that Valve could pull the plug out of it. But as said, not everything on Steam is on GOG and even if it's on GOG, then it could be that it's not complete. I have no problems using Steam. It's not always stable, but it works. Currently there is no sign that steam would end and actually i don't see that happen anytime soon. We live in a time where cloud computing is a thing and the time where games would be fully pressed on a cd or dvd is gone. Current dvd's which are sold in the stores are no more then a placeholder for the steam installer. That is the current time. It's all online.

I tend to agree with nightcraw1er.488 here - they won't bother with DRM-free anymore if they make big money through microtransactions.

*fell off chair in shock*

Maybe what I should say is, they might not bother with GOG in general anymore if that happened. Obviously "DRM-free" isn't important to most people, so if they make big money GTA:O-style they might want to stop dealing with the hassle of this store. And I think they recognize now that they can't compete with Steam, especially after EGS muscled their way in, so that'd be just another reason to close shop or sell GOG to somebody else. (tbh I can't blame them for trying to truly compete though, to me the momentum almost felt possible around 2015-16.) I almost wonder if even now GOG isn't really worth the hassle to them.

We do disagree on allowing Creation Club stuff here (and GOG tossing out Galaxy altogether, and probably plenty of other things) but I don't think it's worth arguing over currently. :p

That was what I was getting at, and the RDR2 example illustrates it even farther; great observation. This is what I fear would happen if a Cyberpunk multiplayer mode got big. Recall too how all of this is marketed. GTA Online was marketed as a free bonus game, as if they just threw it in with GTA V out of the goodness of their hearts. When, in reality, we know that GTA Online was "the game they REALLY want you to be playing" rather than the singleplayer, and various design decisions seemed, to me, to very obviously reflect that as a fact. In a vacuum, of course I don't begrudge people having fun in the online, but the apparent dishonesty from the company reeks and the fact that these decisions don't exist in a vacuum means that essentially those of us who prefer singleplayer are screwed for the entire future.

These are good points but to counter I have seen people very upset at losing their Scheme accounts. I think while they may subjectively view individual games as unimportant or worthless, if they have invested a lot of money into it, they are looking at the "lost money" aspect. People who genuinely think Scheme will make their games DRM-free if they go out of business are beyond help and in all honesty should not operate heavy machinery, drive cars, or even be trusted to tie their shoes.
GOG has eroded the leverage they could have in negotiating to get games here, by becoming more like Scheme. Galaxy imo was an abysmal mistake that is likely to sound the end of GOG in one way or another...either they will fully become a client-dependent store (in which case I won't recognize them or have any interest), or they will try to re-commit to DRM-free but too much long-term damage has been done where the audience is fractured due to Galaxy. By fractured I mean that if GOG were to say "we decided to be fully DRM-free again, we're getting rid of Galaxy," then Galaxy users would be (rightfully) upset. GOG went too far down this path, imo, but if you ask me, any step down this type of path is too far.

I'm not trying to come off as blaming you personally for the downfall of gaming. But, have you considered that when you and others have made this decision, it is precisely why Scheme is able to have the monopoly/monopsony that it does? In other words, if people are okay buying on Scheme, why would devs/pubs bring things to GOG? They will say, as they often do, "just buy it on Scheme." In other words, that isn't GOG's "fault;" rather, it is on the continued acceptance and dominance of Scheme.