The main difference perhaps being that SimCity was a single player game with tacked-on multiplayer, while Path of Exile is a full-fledged online competitive title with tacked-on singleplayer?

PoE doesn't need Steam at all.
I have it directly through their site and there is not a single mention of Steam in it.
I have about six different characters in various stages and I create new ones for events, so you sure can.

Well I'm going to try downloading it tonight. I'm using the PoE downloader which evidently doesn't allow pausing so I'll keep my fingers crossed. :D I try to avoid Steam whenever I can though I'm not anti-anything, I just try to keep is simple.

Really? Sorry, my mistake then.
I guess I thought if Steam had it, it had to be a Steamworks title since it's free and therefore makes no money for the store.

Torchlight 2 is a great game, and the addition of multiplayer and the larger game world was pretty cool, as well as a number of other enhancements they made to the game engine etc. I wont use the word "better" to describe it as that word is highly subjective and you'd easily find 100 people to say Torchlight 2 is better than Torchlight 1, and another 100 people to say Torchlight 1 is better than Torchlight 2, and similar with comparisons to Diablo. What is "better" to one person's mind depends on what exactly it is about a specific game that that individual person really likes about it, and how they uniquely perceive another game to be in comparison to that, so what I think or someone else thinks is unlikely to match 100% what you personally will feel by playing yourself however.

I enjoyed the original Diablo games and their expansions back in the day and have played Diablo 1 as recently as a year ago all the way through several times and had fun. I went through Torchlight 1 about a year ago from GOG and thought it was awesome as well. Later last year I finally got Torchlight 2 from Steam for dirt cheap as I got tired of waiting for it to show up on GOG and came to the conclusion that it just wasn't going to happen for various reasons. I've played TL2 through now on single player once, and on multiplayer a couple times as well and really enjoyed it and the improvements it brought over TL1.

They're all great games though and while a great many people do it - compare games as to which one they think is better, my mind just doesn't work that way. I think of it like comparing music notes. Which note is better an A or a D? Or chords - a C minor or an E flat major? They're not better or worse in any general purpose unqualified sense, they just exist to be used to create music or to enjoy them or even to dislike them for whatever reasons one might have.

The only really solid way to know whether one's own experience of playing one of the given games is more enjoyable or less enjoyable than one of the others in the end is to actually play it though, or play a demo if one is available to kick the tires so to speak - as every person that says it is a great game like me, there will be someone else who says it sucks for their own unique rationale and neither of us are wrong really, it's just an individual opinion everyone will have.

I really wish GOG could get Torchlight 2. I've read that it improved everything from the first game. The GOG Wishlist has over 6,000 votes for it!

I did too and waited forever, but after seeing it at a friend's place I started to think it just was not going to happen, because the multiplayer component requires a Runic account to join their online game matchmaking service and a lot of GOG'ers would have a heart attack about that I imagine. Not sure if it has any other requirements that would be GOG unfriendly or not, but it's a great game either way and comes on sale for as low as $4.99 from time to time on Steam and various resellers.

What about a singleplayer only version? GOG has some games like that already.

The biggest thing Torchlight 2 brings to the table is the multiplayer which is what people generally anticipate the most. In order to bring single-player only here, both the developer (Runic), GOG, and any other rights holders with decision making powers would have to decide that they want to make a custom single-player only version of the game available just for GOG and also perceive that this would be well received by the userbase. My personal thoughts are that this is very unlikely to happen as the main focus of the game is multi-player and while there would be some number of people happy to see the game here even single-player only, it would be a double edged sword because there would be a large number of people anxiously awaiting the game to show up here in its full glory including multi-player who would be rather upset to see the feature axed out of it. People would probably also be rather angry with GOG for allowing the game to come here sans-multiplayer as well. If the multiplayer component wasn't considered one of the main reasons to buy the game it might be a different story, but I doubt they'd all agree to it in any case. I personally would not have bought a single-player only version of Torchlight 2 here as I wanted it specifically for multiplayer myself, however if they did bring it here single-player only it wouldn't bother me if it made some folks happy as I already own the game on Steam anyway. :)

So there's no way they could make a DRM-free version of the multiplayer section?

They wrote the game and have the entire source code of it so they could make it do absolutely anything they want to do and believe that they'd get a return on investment high enough to be worthy of the time and effort expended. That's the problem, most development houses are going to look at such an effort as a commitment of their time and manpower resources which is higher manpower cost for lower return on investment than allocating that human capital to developing a new game 99 times out of 100. The other problem, is that a multiplayer game with a divided community of two separate multiplayer worlds is confusing to consumers in general and can be a problem. Let's say someone has friends on Steam or wherever urging them to buy the game to play multiplayer, so they're on GOG.com and see Torchlight 2 available and buy it. After they buy it they find out they can only play multiplayer with other people who have bought the game on GOG.com and they have a bad customer experience and are upset at Runic and possibly at GOG too for putting out the game in a way they can't play it with their friends who have it on Steam.

Now, some companies might go ahead and do such a thing anyway, if they perceive that it will be more financially rewarding for the effort than not and are willing to face such potential bad-customer-experience problems, but others just wont because they don't want to take the risks.

In the end, while there might be a small number of games out there that provide a more flexible number of multiplayer options, they're the exceptions to the general rule really. And as unfortunate as it may be, a lot of companies design their multiplayer options purposefully to act as a form of DRM and they actually want that. Just a sad reality of the industry in general. Other companies use Steamworks or similar to provide multiplayer functionality because that way they don't have to develop all that themselves, so they can get their game to market faster and with less development and maintenance overhead. If it was an important factor in the development of the game and the finances of the game leading up to its release, redesigning the game after the fact is going to incur a higher expense and probably a lower return for the effort also because games generally make their biggest money at the initial release and then it trickles downhill after that with small spikes during sales and other significant events. Again, there might be exceptions but they're the oddballs and not the rule.

In short, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a DRM-free Torchlight 2 with DRM-free multiplayer any time soon, it's just very unlikely to happen IMHO.

I'm still waiting for Titan Quest Gold to be released here. If I remember correctly, there were some rumours about it being released this year on GOG...

Still pissed I didn't pick it up on Amazon when it was DRM free, even more ticked when it LEFT Amazon and hugely ticked off once it returned, with Steam.

I'd buy it right quick if GoG go it DRM free.

It's still a shame. I wish devs and game companies would know that they lose customers when they keep jamming this unnecessary DRM into their games. What if a person wants to play their game some 10 to 20 years in the future? DRM can easily make a game non-functional in years time and it's really sad.

But it isn't unprecedented. The same could be said Rise of the Triad, whose multiplayer also requires an account with the developer. If we ever saw it, the game would most likely be in the format of "Single Player works out of the box, multiplayer requires valid key (provided)" which is rather commonplace here. I'm okay with this as I'd only use single player anyway. Sure, some will complain. Some people just like to complain.