I asked the Zoom owners if they will try to make the multiplayer of video games be 100% Digital Rights Management (DRM) free over the weekend and they replied by saying we hear you 100% we will be in touch.

Huh? This is for multiplayer.

Right now on either both gog.com or on Zoom you need CD-Keys or GOG Galaxy or some 3rd party email account to log in into the multiplayer.

I talked to the Zoom owners and told them about this and they responded back to me saying they hear me and they will be in touch soon.

It really depends on the game if you need authentification or not. A few still offer LAN support with dedicated servers and without authentification.

The moment you want match making, ranking lists or stuff like that, you need a way to identify the players however.

As long as you don't care about that, authentification free multiplayer can work.

Matchmaking never belongs and never belonged on PC. All video games that have multiplayer on PC should have Dedicated Servers and A Server Browser List.

I believe, it depends strictly on every DRMed multiplayer game publisher. The distributor can only provide additional tools for multiplayer games, like Steam Community integrated invite system.

For instance, Amplitude Studios are working on implementation of multiplayer in their ENDLESS games for GOG platform. Right now these games (ENDLESS Space 2 and Dungeon of the ENDLESS in particular) are DRMed to Steam API only. They might even remove the multiplayer entirely and don't bother with it though.

Hehe, people who use it might disagree, also those who want to see their names on online ranking lists.

What you ask for is a lot more work (and therefore costs) developing for PC and therefore less games for PC.
Devs are more than happy that they can rely on a existing network structure and don't have to reinvent the wheel for every game.

In 1993 I used to play multiplayer via serial connection but I don't expect that to come back anytime soon. We old farts must face it: The times when LAN support and server selection were a thing are over.

Lol @ Zoom.

LAN should be encouraged in new games and at the very least preserved in old ones and not disabled in favor of DRM alternatives. Dedicated servers are a different beast, they look nice in paper but one can't reasonably expect all of them to be active for decades, so in that case, and for multiplayer only, I understand the appeal of Steam, Galaxy, etc. to both gamers and developers.

If they support self-hosting the servers, multiplayer can be timeless.

It's been over a year now, but last I checked, Factorio and Terraria supported self-hosted servers. Outside of GOG's catalog, I know Minecraft does too.

I think there are a few others too.

It's not the norm, but only because Steam used its existing market momentum to make integration with its centralized servers the norm and like good little dogs, all other stores followed suit, rather than come up with something disruptive and pro-consumer like a reusable self-hosted servers solution for gaming.

"Don't call us, we will call you"

As much as I love hating on Steam as anybody else, in this case it's not really true.

It's not the norm because the majority of peoples don't want to care about setting up servers or even choosing a server on which to play, they to simply start the game and either click on one of their friends in their friend list or click on "join game" and start playing. Anything more than and it's too much of an hassle.

It's the same thing with automatic updates, it's not because peoples were brain washed by Steam that they ignore the pleasures of manually downloading patches, it's because it is, for them, a lot more convenient to just not care about it and have it done automatically.

Concerning the subject of the thread, I have doubts, devs barely care enough to implement Gog multi-player and even then very few support the cross play with Steam feature; so I doubt most will be very motivated to implement Zoom MP on top of it.

The only way I could see it working is if it was a "in place" replacement of the Steam API resulting in the devs not having to do any work to support it, otherwise you will be probably able to count the number of games supporting it on the fingers of a single hand. Alternatively maybe they plan on creating yet another Hamachi / Gameranger clone.

If you want to blame something, blame the console market. Most people want to start the game and play.
XBox Live and Playstation Network were among the first to introduce a communication standard, Valve and Microsoft both tried that on PC, Microsoft failed with GFWL however (now replaced it with XBox Live), Valve was the winner.
Each of XBoxLive, Galaxy or EpicOnlineServices some day could replace Steam as leading multiplayer platform, so far I can't see that happening however.

The key to success is a cross play platform I think, since more and more there's the wish for console and PC players being able to play together (even if in a shooter a gamepad player never stands any chances without heavy auto aim support).

Because "we will be in touch" is a guarantee that they will make all their multiplayer games DRM-Free. Right!...

We don't know for sure what proportion of people care, because it is not lining up with integrators' ambitions, so they won't go there.

People playing Minecraft seem to care. Recently, my wife inquired about setting up a Minecraft server and she usually has zero interest in such things (she's not in the software industry and really prefers not to hear about the details of my work). She ended up going with a cheap third-party plan that was about what it would have cost me to put it in the cloud given the requirements of the server, but assuming she hadn't found anything, it would have been a couple of days' work for me to create her a binary that automatically provisions a Minecraft server in the cloud, provides her with the info and allows her to decommission the server as needed.

Public clouds have been around for over a decade now. Providing a very user-friendly way to spin up a cheap server on the internet not hard at all.

Yes, removing and changing parts from old games without the access to the source codes sounds reasonable.

LOL.

PS: Maybe after we all visited https://www.zoom.com we should also ask the developers of Microsoft Teams to release DRM free multiplayer games...