You probably already know how much I care about GOG customers who are advocating in favour of more DRM ;)

Yes, but that doesn't change anything.

I would be VERY VERY VERY sad to see GOG go.

I value their catalogue of DRM-free games and the relative ease with which we can communicate with GOG staff (I have found neither to be common elsewhere). Yes, GOG has made mistakes, but corporations do that. Up to this point their mistakes have been IMO the lesser of the "evils" of other digital stores.

And I say this having taken serious issue with GOG -- even recently -- and had to re-evaluate their importance to me.

So while I understand peoples' issues with GOG, I think it's always important to stand back and think... what if GOG and their catalogue didn't exist? IMHO that's a pretty bleak place if you believe in ownership.

For DRM-Free it certainly would be.

A mixture of YES and NO for me.
When I have had personal contact with a MOD, it has general been positive.
And they allow us this forum, and are pretty light-handed, so another positive.

My lousy download speed is a real big negative though.

That negative I mentioned and a few others have been making me re-evaluate purchasing more games from GOG. Changes to their front page is one of the others, which makes it hard for me to browse effectively. So it has started to feel like they don't really want my money. So I have already started mentally preparing myself, for longer leaves of absence from the store.

Indeed.

But for me that doesn't change the fact I have a love/hate relationship with them ... more love than hate though.

IMHO any relationship with a corporate entity ultimately settles into love/hate.

Yes, download speeds are the life-blood of a digital store. If you can't download a purchased game in an efficient manner, the size and breadth of the store's catalogue doesn't matter. I certainly have thought twice about purchasing larger games from GOG over the last year or two due to the untold hours (and days) watching large downloads crawl (and often fail).

Sadly I have to be selective what I download or keep from gog, I cant invest in all the storage to keep my entire library on hand but I managed to store of few beloved titles I own here away at least.

O que será será.

If GOG dies, there's no hope for DRM-free anymore. So yes, I do care if it dies. I really don't want to go back to Steam.

Obligatory mention its downfall is absolutely attributable to poor upper management decisions that continues to plague the company.

PC market keeps growing single digits every year, but GOG fails to capture it because Steam beats it in every way. Mostly due to game selection, timely updates, and features.

It' being said for years. Maybe it's an exaggeration. Probably it's not so bad, just not as successful as other competitors (mind we're talking about a business in which one agent is more or less 60%+ of the whole!)
My impression was quite opposite. That GOG has hit its lowest in 2021-22, when Forum annoyances, spam, questionable game releases, polemicism (driven or not by real world crises) and clout-oriented gaming(?) discussions (political fads in gaming, for example) were quite rampant. Now we have a revamped search system with very varied and functional tags, an alternate interface (yes, the classic mode is still here, it's not been just a marketing campaign on anniversary) and many more "old games" releases from big franchises that some years ago we only hoped for. Users were quite vocal about not getting Skyrim, or not having big action titles, or about fighting with a clunky presentation; more or less they've been listened to; is it enough to fit a business to do better in face of competition? Who knows. But something has been done.

Not my problem

I tend to be a bit more optimistic than most people here. GOG may not exactly be highly profitable, but maybe what they do manage to make has always been good enough.

If they were not a subsidiary of a larger company, I might be more worried, but I think owning GOG is a huge PR benefit to CD Projekt as an organization. GOG is thought of fondly and with positivity by pretty much everyone, even those folks posting at other storefront forums. For that reason alone, I think CD Projekt would really think twice about shutting it down, even if it was losing money, which, for the record, I don't think it is.

That said, to answer the OP question, I would be devastated by GOG going away. While I do have all my games backed up, more games are being released here all the time, both newer and older, and we'd miss out on all of those.

But more importantly, it would mean that the war against DRM has been lost, and it would also mean that people in general just don't care if their games have DRM. I've debated with folks elsewhere about this, and lots of people just play a game and then forget it, never giving it another thought, and never wanting to play it ever again. And while I don't understand this attitude, it certainly exists. They are only ever interested in the next big thing, and that's it.

I can certainly relate to that! But I'm willing to put up with it because DRM-free means that much to me. What's strange is that while I average 3 to 5 MB/s (with sometimes frequent drop-outs), I can sometimes hit 35 to 40 MB/s and that fast speed will work for all the files for that particular game, and then drop right back to 3 to 5 for the next one. Random games will go really fast, but most of them won't, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why this is.

Fair point, can't deny.
The fact alone I'm back after a long hiatus is telling too, to be fair... yet on the "technical" side of things there is still so much to be done!

As long as they are operating at a profit, there is no reason for concern. Even if it's a relatively small profit of a few million per-year, it means that the company is successful. Plus, the Resident Evil announcement likely did a world of good in terms of marketing, as many big channels reported on it.

A few million would be a shock for pretty much everyone, in a good way.

But GOG stayed afloat so far, and there is also the usual accounting trickery to account for, and the fact that for a long time they covered the expenses for GWENT's infrastructure, and of course all the Galaxy development... And in general, based on releases and work on the site, they seem to be doing a fair bit better recently, so I'd say that concerns are less justified now than at any point within the past decade.

And to answer the OP, if GOG died I'd probably miss the forum more, it's the only one I'm active on. Otherwise, have more games than I'll play in my lifetime, probably, there is some good freeware out there and more of it bound to appear in the future, there may be a handful of interesting giveaways in some other DRM-free places, and in the odd case that I'll really want something non-free released after that moment I'll get back on the "high seas", where I got almost everything before GOG, and where I'd probably still be if not for pre-"Good News" GOG that made me feel like there may be something worth supporting in this rotten industry after all. But then that went away with the "Good News" moment and all their policy shifts since then, showing that even for them principles are just a marketing gimmick to be thrown under the bus for the sake of growth, profits and getting more, newer and bigger titles.
So, contrary to the opinion expressed by others here. I'd say that the battle for having any sort of principles in this field, not just DRM-free, was lost with GOG's "Good News" moment over 10 years ago, and the only hope of that changing is GOG returning to the fully principled stance it had in its early years. As long as that doesn't happen, GOG shutting down may actually be the lesser evil, since it'll create a void that someone else may fill to some extent. Most likely never at this level, but a small player, whether existing or new, may have space to gain some relevance and attract part of GOG's original niche, while as long as GOG exists that can't possibly happen, and any principled stance in the gaming industry will be defined by GOG's policies, regardless of how much they keep slipping.

You wouldn't lose games you've purchased, but I think you would lose something: you might lose the ability/opportunity to buy further games DRM-free in future. You would likely lose purchasing options.

If GOG were to suddenly go under, it would be very bad for the DRM-free 'movement', and it would probably make it harder to purchase DRM-free games in the future.