Exactly. GOG's policies are not them being "good", but choosing to cater to the needs of a minority rather than directly competing against the mainstream market. Other companies think they get more profit by having more control of their customers, and since most people just accept that, then they just might.

GOGs DRM free policy was extremely successful marketing. When they started they sold mostly DOSBox titles which are impossible to DRM. Therefore they made the extremely smart call to just go in the opposite direction and turn a weakness into a virtue. Best marketing move I've seen in the industry in years. They distinctly set themselves apart from a large part of the market in product and delivery and thereby created a unique marketing position. Which has been extremely successful, to say the least.

But GOG wasn't founded to further some "DRM free revolution", it was founded to make money. But that isn't a bad thing. Quite the contrary.

Well technically it's perfectly possible to add all the DRMs you want to DOSBox games; GPL (especially the one used by DOSBox) doesn't forbid DRMs, you need to provide full source code of everything you do but it would be perfectly possible to do an open source DRM. (Of course that might create a shitstorm but that's another story)

But that's actually kind of the point: of course they are here to make money like any other company, but what's important is HOW they do it.

If a company want to make money by releasing DRM-free games, release all DLC and major upgrade of one of their big budget game for free, etc... then great, even if it's only because they are "greedy" and want my money, I am perfectly fine with it and I will gladly give it to them :) .

Having worked, directly or indirectly, for several big companies, I am perfectly aware that for most of the things they do, good, bad or ugly, there is a "valid" reason (often valid in a very twisted and cynical kind of way) behind it, but it doesn't matter as a customer I care only about what they do... not why they do it.

I think you can actually have the dual goals of idealism and making money in business. I believe there are people at GOG that deeply believe in DRM free and their other policies. The problem is idealism seems to get lost at a certain scale of business (or other attributes get glorified to the point where it never was).

So when people say, "business is not your friend", well sorta, mostly true, but it loses sight of the fact that businesses are staffed by humans and when they're small enough the attributes and beliefs of those humans actually matters.

I've seen people suffer, business-wise, for their ideals. Some made it anyway, some didn't, and it's too rare these days. But even in the US, which seems to have a pretty fucked notion of what's okay in business, it exists.

what GOG seems to have embraced is less of "DRM free because people will pay for it" and more of "people will pay for being treated right."

DRM free and fair pricing is just part of treating people right.