As a Linux user I don't expect the GOG team to officially support Windows games on Wine. The installers were fine until you implemented the recent changes.

Adding a password to avoid someone tampering with the original archives isn't a good solution. Ask yourself this, if the community has already discovered the password and as you said you aren't going to try and toughen the protection, what's exactly the point in continuing this foolish change?

As you might be aware of: pirate groups break entire copy protections out there and the only ones suffering the consequences are the honest customers, and the same thing will happen if you continue with this practice. Pirates WILL crack it and in the end it's us, your own loyal customers and community that will pay the price of your actions.

Another thing to point out, if someone wants to steal games sold by GOG and downloads a version with malware that's his problem not yours. On the other hand you can start providing the MD5 checksum for each file in the game card. Humble Bundle does this so I don't see why you can't.


I'm sorry to say but this attitude is only screaming DRM from a company that promotes DRM-Free and it might end up backfiring on your sales as there are many Linux gamers who buy Windows games that run perfectly fine on Wine and the problem is the installer not the game.

As for me personally, I will not buy a single Windows game from GOG until you remove this crazy password idea. Simple as that.

Voted. I hope they will, but nowadays, it's more and more "our way or the highway" attitude.


That's exactly my issue with this new attitude. I'm all for making changes to accommodate those that are trained to be content with the "one button does it all" mentality and don't want to bother with anything else, but why should the rest of us suffer from these changes? For all of GOG's talk about offering choices, their actions seem to go against it.

As shmerl, it's foremost a matter of trusting GOG's word, and I'm having more and more trouble doing it as time passes.


Cheers, just made a note to do the same in the next days.

Well said. To refresh it to some people in GOG. DRM is not about piracy. DRM is about control. Restricting the user in some way. Making such password in the package is restricting the user who wants to unpack it without installing. GOG can debate whether that action is unsupported or ever needed, but the fact remains - such password is a restriction. So if it's not a DRM, it's a very close kin and such thing coming from GOG is very disappointing.

I just recalled how frustrated I was with Aliens vs. Predator Gold years back. I seem to recall the game itself had no DRM and ran perfectly on Wine. Problem was, the installer wanted to authenticate the included audio CD, and for years wine did not have the kind of interfaces implemented that could present it to the installer that way.

Fast forward many years and get the same treatment from a "DRM-free" store. Way to go.

If has nothing to do with DRM-free or not, You are talking here about extracting the content of the installers, something never officially supported, on an not officially supported system (for the game in question at least.).

If GoG tomorrow decide to use their own proprietary installer because it's more convenient for them, are you going to say that the games are suddenly no longer DRM-free because it's no longer possible to extract the installer content with an open source tool ?

And even without going that far there are plenty of setup maker who don't have any extractor available, if they had use something else than InnoSetup you probably would have never been able to extract the content of the installer to begin with.

Well because they don't use the supported installer and want to play the game on a non supported platform, so it's perfectly normal that it's them who would have to go through the extra pain if they want to do so. It's not GoG job to make sure they games and/or installers works/are extractable on all non-suported plarforms.

If you buy the windows version of a games and want to play it on an Android device, then it's pretty understandable that you will have to jump through some hoops to make it work and that you will most probably need to have a computer somewhere.

It has nothing to do with DRM or being hostile to DRM-free; you can still install the games on any computer, the game nor the installer phone home or anything of the like. It's just a case of an unsuported tools no longer working to do something that wasn't supported in the first place; like I said earlier if tomorrow they decide to no longer use InnoSetup to instead use something else, you might end up in a state where there won't be any tools, free or commercial, available to extract the installer content, but it won't make the games any less DRM-free.

Voted.

It has everything to do with DRM-free. DRM-free is not limited to "supported" or "intended" usage. DRM-free means no artificial roadblocks placed on the data / code. DRM means artificial restrictions which are intended to control the usage (i.e. police it). This password is such restriction. The rest of your post just reiterates the idea of "if it's not supported, DRM-free is not relevant". That's simply false.

Agreed with shmerl, this is a case where they actually are trying to control how we should install the games we paid for.

This really isn't DRM, it's just a poorly thought out way of making the RAR file (seriously, RAR?) inaccessible to both stupid users who would open it and then have problems installing the game, and 'smart' browsers that would helpfully open it for the users. This would have absolutely no effect on stopping malware bundlers and any statements toward that are meaningless.

I will admit that before Gowor explained it I was legitimately worried. Now I'm just disappointed.

As someone who very rarely plays games under Linux, I could say that this really doesn't affect me. However, the whole point in supporting GOG is that I *could* do it if I wanted to. If that feature has now been removed, even though it was unsupported to begin with, I will end up supporting GOG less.

If GOG really wanted to avoid it, they could easily write a custom LZMA2 compressing / decompressing tool, publish the source for the community and be done with it. No smart browsers will be able to chew it. Or if LZMA2 doesn't allow updating the archive fast, they can use any other free format that does. There is no need to resort to RAR (I agree, RAR?) with passwords. It may be just a badly thought through engineering, but it ended up being a DRM-like restriction.

To me it is DRM, I used to be able to do whatever I wanted on any system with the old installers, now I can't.

Another thing to consider - How many people actually extract the game manually instead of installing it normally? The ones that do it are obviously the ones that know what they're doing.


Quoting Gowor here:

"The supported way of installing the games is by using the Installer, which apart from unpacking the files, also creates registry entries, shortcuts, compatibility fixes etc. We want to avoid having the situation, when user will see a unprotected rar file, download and unpack it, and get a "broken" installation, because he didn't use the installer. "

I repeat, normal computer users don't have anything to worry about if installing the games normally and those who extract them manually aren't going to write GOG support that their game isn't working because they know what they're doing.


Honestly it's laughable how many people still believe pirates add malware in their cracks. I'm just saying that adding a password might have the opposite effect on GOG's intentions.

Okay. Can you take the passwords off anyway? You're making it difficult for legitimate customers to play GOGs on other systems.

I don't understand what has happened to GoG this year.

One flat price principle was dropped, even if it temporarily was reconsidered.

Now a new practice with locks is coming. I found the reasons totally illogical though.

If a user purchases and downloads the game and then extracts and installs it in an unsupported way, he/she takes responsibility for the outcome.

As for added malware in installers shared through torrents. It's illegal, that's enough. No comment needed. Let users with such practices pay the price for their choice.

You guys are effectively locking me out of my game library, for many reasons. Find a better way, or specifically support people who have Linux and/or play on linux or any outliers. You are now enforcing a mode of DRM on me, this is not acceptable.

At all.

At least have the game ID and it's hashed password result on the download slide of each game.

While at it I would like to see the hash crc of the Gog's .exe/.bin installer files and a catalogued changelog with last updated date. I get that on Humble bundle and it is useful for me.