So, what was the answer you received? That EULA was clearly there on purpose, it could not have been the original EULA since the game is from 1999 and DRM was not a concept yet back then.

It was. We just didn't call it that back then.

Yeah, it was a part of a manual. By installing a game you agreed to terms included in that text.

Yes, a choice of law provisions is perfectly legal and should in fact be present in every contract in order to solve the myriad of issues that arise in its absence.
Please note that all it means is that the law of the state of California will be the governing law, and this has nothing to do with jurisdiction. Meaning - if EA wanted to bring an action against you for breaching the terms of the EULA, they can bring an action under Californian law in Spain.

Yep, they put this standard shit on all their games. It's also meaningless, since you can download and backup a GOG game and never worry about EA again.

doesn't really matter: the best way is to work with tinfoil like you do with clothing in the winter: i.e. rather many layers instead of one thick one.

UNLESS, the games are reprogrammed to work online using only EA or EA approved servers. That's an important danger there. It could still be considered DRM-free (no software added to manage digital rights), but the effect would still be to depend on a publisher to play a part of the game.

Basically that that was the EULA they got from Ubisoft, and that it just had to be there, but didn't actually mean anything.

You honestly beleive that might happen? Add another layer to that hat because if EA did that, they'd just release their games on Origin and skip GOG altogether. But that's not going to happen either because there's no way they'll allocate the resources required to do that.

What resources? Are you suggesting that having some hundreds of thousands of people playing some old games online is really that expensive for a company like EA? Besides, if it's not profitable they can always come with the same crap they always come with: "not many people were playing it so we shut down the servers".

Look, EA runs a store and that store is tied to an account, the same account that is used for online, for the forums, etc. It's like Steam if you need an easier example. If they can force gog users to sign to an EA account to play online, that's hundreds of thousands of people they can add to their marketing plans.

Yes, I know, tinfoil hat. I just prefer to not trust big publishers, sorry.

There's not trusting big companies and there's thinking up crazy worse case scenarios.

This isn't a lack of trust this is pathological in nature at this point. GOG games can't be changed in that respect for customers that have already bought the games, the games in most cases are either single player only or have long since had their server protocols implemented by 3rd parties. The only way that they could make that happen would be if they were to convince Mr. Gog to breach his contract with us, which wouldn't happen. The games would be yanked from the store before that happened and those with licenses for the games would be the only ones with access.

They could also be covering for newer games that eventually will be old. Lets say Burnout Paradise gets on here eventually. To play that online you would need an EA account to log on to their servers.

The one EULA that EA has will change, so you will see difference in the EULAs that you have with different boxed versions of games, however they will only keep that one up to date, there will not be an EULA for each game, or even for each genre.

I could be wrong, however I think the demons you're seeing here are legal costs rather than malign intentions.

With this EULA, as with just about any EULA, you have to ask yourself two questions. First, do you plan on getting in some kind of legal pissing match with EA? And second, do the games in question contain the ability for EA to enforce parts of the EULA through technical means? If the answer to both of these questions is no (as I believe is the case with just about all the games EA will release on GOG), then the EULA realistically only carries as much weight as you choose to give it.