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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Famously so. The main method of deployment was an offline installer before they made Galaxy, and AFAIK Galaxy just downloads and runs the installer.

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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.

https://content-system.gog.com/

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.

It's not a slippery slope but already full blown DRM plain and simple. Both online functionality limited to GOG-run servers and checks for cosmetic content.

Note that for Gloomhaven, the multiplayer server is one of the players' computers. That player hosts a game and everyone else joins. There are no GOG servers and no company servers.

In version 1.0 of the GOG release, multiplayer is enabled.

In subsequent versions, multiplayer is disabled (in the sense that the button to host or join a game is greyed out) unless the game succeeds at verifying you through Galaxy. (And this is a dynamic status; you can have it enabled, shut off Galaxy, restart the game, and find that it's disabled again.

But apparently that isn't DRM.

Which ones? Honest question. I only remember games for which GOG apologizes in their store page for missing cosmetics or extra features because originally tied to online services (e.g. the Mafia or Yakuza games), or ones in which they are unlocked by default for the same reason (e.g. Dragon Age Origins).

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep... has a full list.

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