I wonder what the slight alternation was? Removal of something online related?

I don't like DRM but, frankly, some of the anti DRM stuff on GOG forums reaches the point of hysteria and paranoia.

Would be nice if that were possible (technically it is possible - just sell it) but as others mentioned, compatibility becomes a potential problem.

If it were the case that all of the stores were selling the same product and those products were supported the same, then the technical reasons would mostly disappear. Unfortunately, that's not always the case and for some titles gOg do not get the same game as other stores (read: Steam), or they do not get the same updates from the developer / publisher.

Now, there is another user who was pretty vocal about this a couple years back, stating that he is willing to take on that risk. And that's fine, but I think for each customer willing to accept that buying the DLC from a different store may cause problems and are okay with the occasional glitch, there are probably several other customers who would be irritated (and cause heavier load on Support) when things do not work.

As for it being DRM, I don't see that.

Hi everyhone and thank you for your many replies.

As many stated using the term DRM was not correct, maybe "vendor/store lock in" would fit better.

I also didn't know that my "Big Pharma"-Problem is the same for all games with DLCs. As Thiev said the alternation is moving assets into the GOG-installer, so if I installed the game it should be 100% equal to the game bought in other stores (or at least all DRM-Free bought copies). So where is the problem? Let me install the main game from humble and the DLC from GOG. There may be some people installing the game to a directory where they can't find it to install the DLC, but with some lines of explanation in the installer and a hint for help in the community (forum/ reddit/ FAQ) this might be no big increase of requests for the support team.

My main problem with this are the following scenarios:
1. I buy the main game on Store XY. Now Store XY goes bankrupt, now I need to spend the 17€ for the main game again, just to play the DLC.
2. I bought the main game on Evil Store. Now I hear that Evil Store does evil things and I don't want to support them anymore. After that same as 1.

Don't get me wrong, from all stores (I know) out there GOG is still the best in my opinion, but without a store lock in it would still be much better.

And yes, I still can download all bought games and backup them on my private server, but there I get no updates.

If you buy a tv from a physical store and you don't take it home with you... then the store burns down... horrible horrible store!

Point is; you buy the games/files - download them. If you see your GOG games as a "collection in the cloud", you might as well stick with Steam.

Yeah! And what's up with that how I have to always use the www.gog.com URL to get to the GOG site and to my account? Why can't I use any URL I want, like www.kek.com, and I would still come to GOG? Sounds quite much like GOG forces us to use only certain URL, as if URL has DRM. GOG is becoming more "centralized" in that way too.

Well ok, maybe it is not quite DRM, but at least it is a kind of URL lock-in, forcing us to use certain URLs to get to the sites we want. And I don't like it!

What's worse, if GOG ever went bankrupt then www.gog.com would not work anymore! www.kek.com might still work, but I can't use it to get to the GOG site due to URL lock-in.