Very good, thank you!

Apparently they found the issue and already sent a fix to GOG!

https://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1025991#p1025991

Thanks for good news.
Wait and see.

It should be up now!

Yes and works fine on my offline computer.

Thank you

"Beat Hazard 2 - online DRM. The game can't be started at all without being online. It is fully DRM-ed!"

Could be that this has been fixed. I have been asked to check the current build. Unfortunately I don't own the game so it would be nice if somebody else could test if it still needs online connection.

Ok so I tested Beat Hazard 2.

I downloaded the offline installers (via Galaxy because I cannot download anything via the website :( ) then disabled the network connection, made sure that Galaxy was totally shutdown, killed all its services, etc...

1. Installed the game and tried to start it.

- It automatically started Galaxy even thought the shortcut was pointing directly to the game EXE.

2. I quit the game, quit Galaxy again, renamed Galaxy exe to prevent it from starting and...

- Started the game again.
- It started, asked me which control scheme I wanted to use (mouse or gamepad), the language but then got stuck on

"Checking player 1 stats"

I tried to wait a couple of minutes to see if there was some timeout but it seemed to get stuck forever.

3. I quit the game again, re-enable the network and restarted it.

- The game started,
- This time it asked me for a player name, I put a random value.
- I reached the main menu.

I quit the game, disable my network and try to restart it.

- The game started normally and I reached the main menu.

4. I tried on another Windows partition where Galaxy never was installed, to do a fresh install.

- The game got stuck at the "Checking player 1 stats" like before.
- I quit the game and copy the same files from the other install.
- Restarted the game
- It start without issue and I am able to start playing it.

So in conclusion :

Can the game be played without Galaxy : Yes, even if it try to auto start Galaxy it doesn't seem to mind if it is not present.

Can the game be installed and played offline : No, you can play the game offline but you need to have an existing save file and this file can only be created if online at least once.

Is there a workaround ? : Yes, apparently the game only needs a save file, it doesn't need to be activated only or anything, so if you keep a copy of your save you should be able to install and play fully offline. Disclaimer: I have tested in a VM but not on a totally different computer, also I only played a couple of minutes I don't know if there might be any issues later while playing offline.

So tl;dr; : IMHO I don't think the devs were trying to stealthily add a DRM, but it is definitely something that needs to be fixed! If nobody else does it I will create a support ticket.

Why is that? Is it temporary or permanent?

I'll test this with the offline files once I get home.

Permanent.

Since more than a year (opened a ticket but no solution in view) when I try to access my "Games" page it timeout with the Gog bear.

It works with Galaxy (even if Galaxy takes 2-3 minutes to start....)

Tried with different ISP, different computers, different browser, VPN to other country, etc... nothing help, I even offered Gog team to give them my password so that they can test directly but apparently it's against their rules.

Thank yopu for the detailed report. I forwarded your results and It should help GOG to finally fix this for good.

Wow!

Perhaps it has something to do with the number of games you have. The GOG catalogue has always had a limit on the number of items it can display, which they would raise once reached (e.g. 1000, 2000, 5000). Perhaps there is a similar obscure limit for one's library. Just a thought.

"Gersen = 5314 games". Did the problem start roughly the same time as you hit 5,000 games? If so, then as mrkgnao said, that could well be it. Maybe it's worth asking GOG to delete any demos / games you dislike to get it below 5,000 (and if not, see if hiding enough of them to push it below 5,000 works)?

Is that still happening TODAY?

For a while there was an issue where the search function and filters would break after reaching 4096 games. I reported it and GOG fixed it.

Would it be OK to PM you to ask some questions?

Yeah, Galaxy takes a good 4 minutes to open for me with just 4.2k games.

That is no workaround. GOG MUST fix issues for users with large library issues. Period.

I also experienced a weird issue after reaching 4096 games where my movie and game libraries were merged into one, filters, sorting and the search ceased working.

I reported it and it got fixed. I think they said they raised the game limit to 10,000 now or something.

I can confirm Gersen's report.

After installing the offline installer files from the website on a computer without an internet connection and without the GOG Galaxy client, the game starts, ask for the input profile and than the game got stuck with the "loading player statistics" message.

This should be fixed or removed from the GOG store.