You will need to register a free GOG account, or log into an existing one.
Download and install the GOG GALAXY 2.0 application. If the scratchcard appears to be missing from the game box, contact the retailer from whom you purchased the game.
Probably the latter.Where can I find my game code? Your game code is printed on a plastic scratchcard found inside your game box. Maybe there is a way back, maybe there isn't. Right now, they will just keep posting losses until the board decides to close it all down. Had they remained in their niche, their business would be small but steady. That was not what their customers were expecting, and new customers were hard to draw in. They had a good business packaging and selling good-old-games, but they thought they could "do better" and invested lots of money to become a "new games" shop. This is not a made-up story and yet it's a perfect analogy to what gog has done. Long story short, the business went belly-up after a few hard months. The "old" customers were coming to buy second-hand clothes so they saw no point in coming to the new shop, they were only interested in what the old shop had to offer. The customers didn't come to the shop as there were many other similar (and arguably better) shops. Operating costs went way up while the turnover went way down. Invested pretty much everything in the new shop and the first batch of new merchandise and. But she wanted more so she took the money and opened a bigger shop in a better (and more expensive) location to sell *new* clothes. It had many happy customers and the money was flowing. It was a low-budget enterprise that gave modest returns. Some thirty years ago, a person who shall remain unnamed, opened a second-hand clothes shop. I don't think they have much in the way of surviving. Quoting: they want to survive, they had to bend over for the publishers demands or not have a game to sell. Yeah, this means refusing precisely the super popular AAA games, that is the trade-off they were making since the beginning. "We stand against DRM because we need to, but keep trying to find loopholes to allow it" is not a good selling point. They don't get to wriggle out and exploit technicalities, not without severely undermining their claims. Multiplayer is another big one, as the statements make clear, because usually publishers have so much control over multiplayer that it doesn't make much sense to talk about DRM.īut GOG advertised themselves as a DRM-free store. Or Steam's "you need the client to get the first copy of the DRM-free game" and "you need the Steam API and workshop for some features" - it is clearly not DRM from any rigorous definition, but for some people it hardly matters. Hitman was one such case - "it is totally not always-online DRM, it is just a system to offer additional features!" and clearly lots of people saw it as equivalent to DRM.
Not all restrictions are created equal while some are explicitly labeled as DRM, and fit a strict definition, some are more subtle about their control but accomplish similar goals. Urgh, when they start having to decide what technically counts as DRM-free to justify themselves things are pretty fucked. When it comes to multiplayer "games with those features belong on GOG", although they will be updating the GOG store to let you more easily discover them and add more info to store pages to help better inform potential buyers. They also said they will continue to "make games compatible with future OSs and available for you for years to come". There are already a few games that use the Galaxy API for multiplayer instead of a standalone solution. Point number 3 is an interesting one, as it's only optional for single-player.
The GOG GALAXY client is and will remain optional for accessing single-player offline mode. Games you bought and downloaded can never be taken from you or altered against your will.ģ. The single-player mode has to be accessible offline.Ģ. Here's the three main points they will stick to:ġ. It is a complex thing, as they say, as so many games now offer online features even for single-player titles, so GOG has more of a plan to handle them now. They talk a little about how things have changed, and that some "of the most infamous DRMs of the past are thankfully long gone, it doesn’t mean the constraints are fully gone". GOG is well-known as the DRM-free store, and this isn't exactly changing but they're tweaking what they mean by it.
It comes at an interesting time, since there was a bit of an issue with the HITMAN release that ended up being pulled down since it required online to do a lot and unlock a lot of things.
The GOG team have confirmed in a new update on their plans for the store, and it seems they will continue to note that their Galaxy client is optional.