Not to mention:

1. Not everyone has super fast internet that updates take a 'minute or less'. Sometimes the updates to the clients take 5 minutes or more for me, sometimes much longer.

2. I can't remember the game being talked about, but thinking it might have been skyrim or fallout, but updating the games, especially when it isn't needed (ie, a graphic got updated somewhere, or they optimized something that didn't really need it) can break mods, which a LOT of people like. Which means you can't continue your save game until the mods are updated, which can break things, and sometimes it can take a while for mods to be updated to work nicely with newest updates.

3. Sometimes people might not have access to internet, but still want to play games, and with Steam that is extremely hard to do, if not impossible at times.

Yes. I was talking about layers of actions needed to actually start the game.

With GOG offline installers, you can install it one time and you're done with it, as long as you maintain the stability of the system you're using to play it.

With Steam, things are different. You can't maintain stability as you have no control over their forced updates (You need to update before launching.). Also, it's common to see things breaking, like mods, for example.

^ Exactly this.

You don't think it's possible that GOG would become profitable if it sold both DRM-free and DRM'd games?

I think it would work if they did it without pretending that they weren't doing it. That's what I think is killing them.

On the one hand, I agree that a bit more honesty would go a long way. On the other, flat out labelling DRMed games as such would a) be the ultimate admission of defeat and b) would probably lead to a situation similar to Humble, which went from DRM-free to Steam key seller at breakneck speed.

Personally, I don't really care any more. Look at the Legacy of Kain thread and you'll see what I mean. "BETRAYAL! I'M NEVER SHOPPING HERE AGAIN!" one minute, "OMGGG!!!! INSTABUY!!!" the next. The community gets what it deserves. A microcosm of what's wrong with this industry. All that's left for me to do at this point is gaze into the abyss and laugh.

Actually you're wrong. GOG never had a loss in the yearly financial results. You can easily check this out. The financial results are published at a regular basis and are publicly available on the CD Projekt website. This year looks a little worse, so it might be the first year in GOG's history without a net profit. But it barely changes anything as in 2020 GOG had a record profit, so there's a meaningful safety buffer. And which major company are you thinking about? I can't literally find any major player in the industry, which would be interested in upholding the DRM-free values. Smaller companies don't have enough funds.

What about quarterly results? Those are the ones I see posted on the forum from time to time, so that's where I got the idea of gog being in the red from. And I can't remember the exact year (2018ish) where their profit for the year was something to the tune of $7000. Again, the exact number escapes me, but I'm not making this up out of thin air either.

Neither does Gog these days

Some quarterly results look worse indeed. There were a few quarters with losses in the past, but they were always compensated by the next periods. 2018 was indeed the worst year in GOG's history, when it comes to financial results. Here you can find charts showing profit by year and yearly sales revenues. All results are in million PLN.

I don't care that much either because the whole world is going down in flames, but I think they might be able to pull it off *if* they truly wanted to. At this point, that doesn't seem to be the case, so let them reap what they've sown.

If there is no buyer, then GOG will need to reverse it's course from the misguided path they are on. Otherwise they will continue to lose money.

2022 says hi! YOU AIN'T SEEN NUTHIN YET!

No, I don't. GOG only got where it did on the back of having no DRM, to become a DRM agnostic store would negate the entire point. Most old hands and DRM free absolutists would leave, and the fairweather support would eventually dry up and go back to Steam.

Many of the DRM-absolutists went to Steam long ago thanks to their great support of a DRM-free Operating System.

On topic:
The decision to close all threads related to other games stores is quite telling.
As long as GOG was relevant due to their (now long ago betrayed) principles, they didn't feel the need to do that.