Well, not that I'm suggesting it, but you could do it this way:
- When you start the game offline, you get a nice very rare item. If you ever go online, even once, you lose it.
It makes about as much sense, and is as fair and welcome as the current reverse implementation.

Maybe technically they could, but probably legally they couldn't. If they did, then the devs/publisher could most likely sue GOG for reverse-engineering their IP without their permission, or something like that.

On the other hand, GOG could probably sue the publisher/devs for putting DRM into the SP portion of their game, which most likely is a violation the contract they signed with GOG. However, actually to do that would take a strong will on GOG's part to fight for this cause, which they probably don't have.

It is a bit more complicated than that, by the time GOG even enters to the minds of most developers they have likely already spent their entire multiplayer budget, so the idea that by GOG refusing to sell single player games with "impure" multiplayer support would be a sure way to lead to a better future could be argued to be overly optimistic.

In a way one could see the single player side and the multiplayer side of the same DRM'ed game as a married couple seeking a shelter from GOG with the former having a minor ailment that could be easily cured, but the latter possibly being terminally ill. Some of us just don't find it reasonable to banish such a couple back to the wasteland of DRM'ed games or to demand that the easily curable side ritually sacrifices its mate at the gate in order to be allowed to get in.

There are no real solutions to this that could satisfy all fans of DRM-free gaming especially when some of us have realized that the opportunities to play multiplayer with our friends have not become fewer and fewer because of DRM, but because our schedules keep conflicting more and more as the years pass by, so that kind of undermines the value of being able to host our own servers and might place more weight on the importance of being able to replay our single player games.

This is so wrong: the publisher can decide the timeframe in which denuvo does checks, lords of the fallen and dragon age inquisition had absurdly high frequency checks.

Not to mention monster hunter iceborne, which does checks constantly, sometthing like per minute (then again crapcom added so much bullshit into that game, denuvo, their custom anti-tamper, anti-debugger, FULL online only content which has no reason to be locked behind online and so on).

Not trying to argue with you btw, just wanted to clarify this about that snake oil crap.

Er, thanks for the additional info but snake oil crap? I said it was my own experience ('ime'). In all the Denuvo games I've played (about 4) that has been roughly the time it periodically has requested an online check after being in Steam's offline mode. If some games check more frequently then that's hardly a good thing either, however I was simply responding to someone making the half-joke/half-informative post that Denuvo only checks once.

.. so they go on to add support for Galaxy DRM multiplayer? And GOG won't make it DRM-free, even though they could. Come the fuck on.

Right now the situation is that most games here that have multiplayer have it DRM-free. A few require CD-keys or third party services. Increasingly, new games only support multiplayer through GOG's DRM.

Somehow, GOG can strong-arm and pressure developers into removing their DRM and adding all sorts of Galaxy support, so I'm sure they could also strong-arm some of them into removing their DRM from multiplayer (and GOG could remove their own DRM).

The rest of your post is you explaining that some of you don't care about multiplayer, which is fine and I already know that you don't care. The fact that you don't care doesn't make the game DRM-free. I just had to make that point because it puts the DRM of a small part of single player content into perspective with an entire half of the game (or however much multiplayer amounts to; for some people it's the entire game and the single player is just a tutorial) being locked behind DRM.

Yes, they could. But they don't want to. They want to have Galaxy-DRM on all games eventually. 'DRM-free' as marketing gimmick has served it's purpose to make GOG big. Now they think they can drop it because they have plenty of customers who don't care as long as they get their achievements.

But they are not big.

Apparently big enough to drop DRM-free. Or in other words: the original DRM-free crowd has become small enough that we don't count anymore.

Btw, has anyone tried to contact Hello Games to find out their stance on this?

Nah, the snake oil tactic wasn't on you, I wes referring to denuvo/irdeto and the shenanigans they started with the drm crusade, even after pc gaming take it's flight without their need.

You were kinda lucky btw with your games, my friend has been permanently locked by one of his game, while for another one he was stuck for over 6 months.

Anyway my apologies for going OT.

My sincere apologies for writing this, but I am starting my first ever refund process,
as I am unable to install this game offline (due to graphic driver problems.)
I have no further conclusions.

It's not linked to "offline" or "online" it just means that your drivers are not compatible with Vulcan. Did you try to update them ? normally, unless you are using some old integrated graphic chip, newer drivers should be compatible with Vulcan.

I said most developers, not all and unfortunately some of them seem to be so used to implementing their multiplayer support through the Steam API that they would rather hack in the Galaxy API to replace that than start from scratch.

That of course has nothing to do with releases of old classics with "old school" multiplayer support happen less and less often nowadays while the newer games have their multiplayer being designed for the more numerous modern multiplayer gamers who rely on various online multiplayer features that would not be possible or would not really work well with the playerbase being divided between countless player hosted servers...

Turning a DRM'ed single player game DRM-free only requires cutting out the DRM and in most cases you would not be able to tell if that has been done or not if I would only allow you to access the game from it's main menu whereas some forms of multiplayer would only become "DRM-free" by being replaced with some more DRM-free friendly form of multiplayer, which would take a lot more resources to do and would become an additional thing to support, so we are talking about many orders of magnitude greater expenses than what you seem to be thinking.

Actually, my point was that regardless of how much one might care about multiplayer, some forms of it may have the online only disease spread too deep into their design for GOG to have any hope of convincing the developers to do anything about that as once their server requirements jumped to the datacenter category, there may be no easy way of coming back from that to offer any dedicated server support for us.

And if it is not easy, then it might as well be almost impossible for GOG to get any developer to agree to do that in order to be able to sell their game here, if even getting the achievements to be ported to the Galaxy API is in the edge of things developers are willing to do.

This isn't about not caring at all about multiplayer, but acknowledging that over the years the old school multiplayer we would prefer has "evolved" into something else that can't always be reasonably expected to work DRM-free no matter how much we would wish for that, so at that point one may as well see if the single player merits alone would be enough to buy such games, as outright boycotting them would only be a bit more likely to change the multiplayer to our liking than all of GOG's customers refusing to play WoW could eventually convince Blizzard to redesign it into a turn based offline RPG.