Which is kind of what I want from GOG, honestly, for the newer games. The GOG update process is kind of annoying, so an optional client with no DRM attached would be great. Of course the funny thing is a lot of people here associate client with DRM, because of the same idea Valve sold them: to have that client, you need this DRM. Which again is untrue.

It's funny how the human brain works. Marketing classes are insane lectures about how to manipulate the human brain.

Agreed, I wouldn't mind a gog client that handled the updating in the background, perhaps offered some multiplayer capability, and maybe even alerted me to some nice sales on games on my wishlist kind of thing. I have no problem with clients per se, I just don't like clients that are required and require an online login/confirmation to be used. That's why I actually hate Green Man Gaming's client worse than I do Steam's. I can, through long time verification, play my Steam games in offline mode without internet access. Not so with GreenManGaming's capsule. Every time I want to play one of those games, I have to have internet access and log in. I haven't spent another dime there since I learned that, yet I've spent plenty at Steam.

I'm still not a big huge fan of Steam, because they do sort of use their client as a DRM, but it's only initially and not really much different than the online code activations of the past. But still, it is DRM, and therefore don't blame others if they still boycott it and don't like it. I just decided after years of refusing to buy there that consumers had already reached a verdict on Steam and so long as I know offline mode is working and meant to work indefinitely offline, I'll buy there. GreenManGaming will never get another dime from me though.

And if gog offers a voluntary client that doesn't require online handshakes (accept of course if you want to use whatever multiplayer access it offers or to see sales and buy/download games) I would consider that a PLUS for gog, not a minus. I think if any company were going to do a client right, it would be gog.

From the informations I had at the time I used it, the .impulse format couldn't even be used on another computer (it was os specific). But I didn't try.

I think those archive are not very useful and Impulse was probably not succesfull enough to interest some programmer in making an utility to extract from them.

As long as they keep to that promise, I don't see any real problem.

And if the games they had sold to you were DRM-free (I presume they aren't?), then I could even understand if at some point they run the whole service down, at least giving a long time for customers to reclaim their purchases for local repository. After all, realistically G.G.com will not be around forever either, but as long as you have downloaded all your purchased games before the final shutdown, you should be fine.

If, however, you find at some point that you can't install nor play your purchased games any more, due to the changes or shutdown of the service (not related to your own (lack of) actions), then you should be very angry.


I think this case also shows how easily a digital store, who starts selling "also" Steam keys, easily slips into a shop which delivers only keys to other major services (like Steam), and shuts down its own infrastructure and service, not competing with the other services anymore. This is just a reminder to the folks who say G.G.com should start also supplying and selling Steam keys.

Bingo.

People don't mind DRM... until it bites them to the ass.

Only in the same sense that Steam was "upgraded" into "SteamPowered". Ie. that's what the domain name said, but the service wasn't actually called that.

Ah, okay. I stopped following the development pretty soon after Impulse started - I didn't really appreciate that my games from Totalgaming.net, a service which allowed to make working offline backups of games, were suddenly moved to a service that that kept gamers on a much tighter leash.

I probably mixed something up in the history of Impulse - though I do seem to remember that Impulse went through several changes as well, even when it was still under Stardock's rule.