Comment by bpye
Comment by bpye 2 days ago
There is no DRM on GOG.
https://www.gog.com/blog/what-exactly-is-drm-in-video-games-...
Comment by bpye 2 days ago
There is no DRM on GOG.
https://www.gog.com/blog/what-exactly-is-drm-in-video-games-...
GOG's original and somewhat current line in the sand is "must have an offline-capable installer". For a lot of Good Old Games that is enough to guarantee DRM-free. Unfortunately in the Live Service world it is a concession that allows too many loopholes such as Sony single player games that still need a PlayStation Account and a half-dozen telemetry services active before they get to actual gameplay. Sony, as a particular example worth flogging, also makes use of the loophole that an anti-cheat rootkit can be installed offline, easy.
I think GOG is saying a lot of the right things in terms of Game Preservation being a long term goal for them. I think they are between a rock and a hard place that the store would be a lot less active if they couldn't offer the latest games from companies like Sony, and they want to be on good terms with such companies to get access to their giant back catalogs for Preservation efforts which also presumably includes sales numbers of recent titles for justification.
But yes, I'd also love to see them push back a bit harder on some of these publishers a bit further than "needs an offline-capable installer" and mabye include more steps towards some definition of "should run offline-capable", because yeah things like "Live Services" and account systems and mandatory telemetry systems and rootkit anti-cheat systems are often de facto DRM just wearing another hat of "user convenience" or "achievement tracking" or "game safety" tools. I don't think GOG can make that push alone, though. There are too many industry trends to try to buck to get further in those directions. (Thinking about the recent Anthem shutdown as a recent for instance of a mostly single player game that is entirely unplayable because EA shutdown live services this month.)
It was an early complaint about Horizon: Zero Dawn, especially but not uniquely, on GOG. Sony did walk that requirement back several months after the complaints started, but it wasn't directly because they thought they violated any of GOG's explicit policies, it seemed more directly due to the user complaints and review bombing on Steam from what I saw.
Yet the standalone offline installed games won't run without libgalaxy.dylib (Mac) or Galaxy64.dll (Windows) which is responsible for outbound connections to https://galaxy-log.gog.com and https://insights-collector.gog.com?
To be clear: if you buy Disco Elysium on GOG, download the "offline game installer" without using Galaxy, install it, and run the game on a desert island, it will work (the network requests fail open). But if you try to run the game after removing the bundled dylib/DLL, it will not.
Why do Galaxy-free games ship with a mandatory dependency on Galaxy?
> Why do Galaxy-free games ship with a mandatory dependency on Galaxy?
Because the developer linked the dynamic library in at compile time instead of writing additional code to load it at runtime and disabling/enabling features based on its presence.
You can call it budget limitations, incompetence or lack of respect for the customer. Doubt it's intentional DRM though.
Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)
Depending on the launcher does not imply DRM. It could be a features-dependency to make the old games working or just allow certain features.
Galaxy can be required for multiplayer aspects in games, but if what you say is true for the singleplayer part of the game, GOG will consider it a bug, and will get it fixed.
There's nothing in the Crime Cities GOG forum about this, nor in the various tracking threads in the main forum, and generally GOG users are extremely sensitive about anything which even reeks of forcing Galaxy, so I'd strongly expect any issue to be known.
I've seen cases where the developer implemented a bad online check, so that if you blocked the program from accessing the internet while the OS reported being online, the game would hang or crash, but being fully offline would work. Could it be that something like that was at play here? Oh, or that you simply picked the wrong installer for the game, and thus ran the Galaxy-installer rather than the offline installer?
Not quite. You can use Galaxy to download the offline installers (or just do that through the website), but when you install a game through Galaxy, it downloads a special build which it just copies to the right location, without running a separate installer.
No, it doesn't use offline installers. Source: worked on that in the past.
The running game can also call out to Galaxy and unlock, or not unlock, ingame content based on what it hears back. It's pretty difficult to imagine a definition of "digital rights management" that doesn't include this.
As far as I remember, the only games which optionally need Galaxy running are those will online multiplayer, and only if you want to play online. This is because the original developers shutdown their own servers for matchmaking or originally used Steam servers for that. GOG servers are only replacing those.
There are also a handful of games which put some additional purely cosmetic content behind an online check. That could be the start of a slippery slope, which people are justly upset about, but they then do an injustice to their cause by generalizing from those cases.
I guess depends what you consider DRM, some games appear to have problems
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/label_the_games_that_have_...