• industrialdeerfluff@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 hours ago

      While thats a list of plenty of unfortunate things, it’s not exactly what people mean by drm, and in some cases kind of absurd for them to conflate.

      DRM is generally refering to restrictions on your ability to install, share, and use a game.

      Games having extra content thats connected to an online server or the creation of an account is unfortunate but not drm, theres also out dated ones in that list like the twitch drops in cyberpunk just being in the game now.

      Online games having anti cheats and dependencies, or wanting you to have an account is also unfortunate especially if invasive but not a restriction on your ability to install or share a game.

      In that list im only seeing DEFCON and Multiwinia having a key verification server which is supposed to be disabled in the offline installers. other games mention having verifications removed some seemingly unsuccessfully at the time of that post.

      Alot of these things are issues with games preservation in general, something that GOG actually does alot to help with, theres plenty of old games that come with fixes, patches, and dlls that make them run on modern hardware that other online stores that still sell the games don’t provide.

      The thing about it not being drm is you can backup the installers, you can just give them to a friend, it doesnt phone home and check if this computer has some license, it doesn’t try and match hardware, or limit you to a certain number of installs.

      • Sergius@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 hours ago

        If there are outdated entries, feel free to comment in that forum thread as it still seems to get regularly updated. Doesn’t change that it happened, though. It required a public backslash for GOG to remove HITMAN GOTY after all.

        I’d say hiding part of the content of a single player behind online connection is a type of DRM. Even by your definition, you won’t be able to back up installer that includes that content. It’s absolutely a DRM, if not for the entire game than for definitely for DLC.

        But even if you dismiss those and multiplayer games, there’s still more in that list that DEFCON and Multiwinia. Any game that requires Galaxy has as much DRM on it as any that requires Steam. Admittedly, not all of those seems to be intentional. Some of them are due to the bugs, but it still prevents players from just backing up installer and sharing it with friends. It’s nice that GOG helps with patches for old games, but apparently when it comes to Galaxy requirement, the official solution usually is “just use Galaxy”.

        In the end, the claim of the previous poster was that GOG doesn’t allow selling games with DRM, which even a single example proves wrong. GOG may do a lot of good for preservation, but that doesn’t mean they are not beyond reproach.