Time4Tea: It might be clear for you that the Galaxy store is separate from GOG, but in many users' eyes, Galaxy and GOG are one and the same. I'm not sure I see the distinction, tbh, when the development of Galaxy has been funded by profits from the GOG store and it appears to all be under the same team/P&L.
It's pretty clear from the fact that the stores are separate even within Galaxy. There is a GOG Galaxy Store and GOG.com store. Spinning off an entire staff team, support team, etc is very unrealistic, when the amount of money to be made is tiny to begin with unless you want to go the EGS route and blow a butch of money and not turn a profit for years just to compete with Steam. Not realistic for GOG or CDP for that matter. What does it matter if GOG funds this or not or another store? It's all coming from the same pocket book in the end ie CDP... the parent company. No different then sales of the Witcher or Cyberpunk funding GOG.
Time4Tea: It's unrealistic to expect GOG to stay true to the founding principles it was built on and that allowed it to grow and be successful in the first place?
No it's fine to hold them accountable in confines of the GOG.com store where this principles were made, it unrealistic to carry those principle to other projects outside of GOG.com like Galaxy or to expect them to adhere to that even when it's separate from GOG.com store.
AB2012: Honestly this sounds as unconvincing now as it did in the old thread linked to in post #2. Literally no-one except GOG staff see Galaxy as
"a completely separate store to GOG.com" any more than anyone calls GalaClient
"a completely separate store to IndieGala" or itch.io's app
"a completely separate store to itch.io". They aren't "ring-fenced" in any business sense of being run by different sub-companies, they file the same tax bill, run by the same staff from the same office, etc. It's literally called "GOG Galaxy". Simply removing the website's .com is like saying Microsoft and microsoft.com are two completely different entities. It's just silly semantics that sounds more like GOG have already privately decided to start selling DRM'd games, know the sh*tstorm it would case with many GOG customers, but can't think of any way of publicly justifying it beyond passing off one store + a client as
"two totally separate stores"...
None of those clients tend to be a unified store front and client for all stores. GOG Galaxy aims to be just that. That's the key difference. Should they have possibly went the Steam/Valve route and separate client branding from GOG branding? Maybe.
But they do separate both stores within the client itself...