Woodkirk Stone
GOG recently added Hitman to the storefront, locking much of the game behind still-online DRMs, resulting in a torrent of trouble for the store.
GOG was proud to only sell games without DRM, but Hitman’s recent addition was extremely controversial. The game only allows offline play of story and bonus missions, while everything else requires login.
To give you a better overview, you need to be online if you want to:
- Climbing missions
- Elusive targets
- User-created contracts
- Unlocking the weapon
- Outfit Unlock
- Unlocking the equipment
- Unlocking the starting point
The game itself, just like the content listed above, is completely single player and shouldn’t require you to be connected to the internet and this issue has been the main issue that has continued to lower the general opinion of gamers on a game. otherwise excellent game. Now it’s on GOG, a storefront that supposedly prides itself on only selling games without DRM.
When users started leaving negative reviews because of the DRM Always On, GOG started calling it a bombardment of reviews. Considering that much of Hitman is stuck behind online DRM and being sold on GOG, it’s hard to see where the company is coming from with this tag as it looks a lot like a real issue where buyers did not get what was announced.
GOG doubled down by stating that they will not tolerate the alleged bombing
and some of those notices will be deleted.
It all takes a very ironic turn when you realize that a high profile anti-DRM site from a few years ago is now redirecting to GOG. The site in question is www.fckdrm.com, which used to highlight the negatives of DRMs
whether integrated or requiring an online connection.
Nowadays, the site technically no longer exists. If you go to the address mentioned above, it will instead redirect you to the GOG store which appears to have moved away from the strictly DRM-free policy and enter the gray area where partial DRM is tolerated.