I'm feeling conflicted about this. A client that can actually compete with steam is much needed to break its stranglehold on games distribution. Having competition like that around would discourage Valve from trying to abuse their market position again, like they've been increasingly doing over the years. It could also result in a shift back to less DRM if it gains enough clout, such as getting rid of steam-authentification for retail copies.
However, I simply cannot trust a company to be true to its word, even in cases where they're legally forced to. Being DRM-free is such a big part of their identity that moving away from it would be a bad business move in the short term, but I could see them starting to try and change what counts as DRM-free and what doesn't. Furthermore, I seriously doubt that they wouldn't throw DRM-free under the bus if the potential profits were great enough. All the games I've purchased are fortunately safely squirreled away, but I wouldn't be happy about having to wait for yet another alternative to be created.
I would rather see some sort of open-source client get produced through which you can buy and download games. That way there wouldn't be a company controlling it with the incentive to try and monetise it as much as possible. No real chance of that happening.
I'll just keep a close-eye on this for now and keep a look out for other places to get my games. I already don't expect them to keep their promise about the client staying optional. They'll probably make the client the superior way of downloading games, at which point they'll quietly get rid of the old downloader.
I don't expect this to be be good for consumers in the long run, though we probably won't see a catastrophe until American or British CEO's start working for CD Projekt.
Seriously? So their releases are basically abandonware games with pre-setup dosbox that have all the problems that an amateur setup I can do in 5 minutes has, great job. Even worse, some games have problems that aren't there normally, for example you can install original Dungeon Keeper on most xp and 7 machines and it runs great, if it doesn't, you just use KeeperFX and voila. GOG release? You hit alt+R to switch to high res and game becomes unplayable on i7 + 16GB RAM rig. Same with other Bullfrog games on that engine. Does anyone run these games before release (I'm not asking about honest testing, since that's obviously skipped)? If no then gg, if yes then why no one gives a shit about issues that are noticeable 1 minute after running the game and are obvious showstoppers?
