DetouR6734: Two games i've encountered so far, that both connect out on startup and will both crash if it's blocked by the firewall.
Kingdoms & Castles
Rise of Industry
Now this is seriously starting to irk me, Kingdoms & Castles was a recent development (Jan) and it was never an issue prior to a patch sometime around then.
It's not DRM as such, but it basically acts like it, as connecting out should never be a requirement unless you're wanting to play online.
Geralt_of_Rivia: I know what the problem is. It's not Unity's telemetry that's to blame. I have never seen a game crash due to firewalled Unity telemetry.
The problem most likely is GOG Galaxy. Every game that has Galaxy features tries to connect to the Galaxy service on your computer to check if Galaxy is available. If the connect succeeds Galaxy features are enabled and all is well. If the connect is declined (in other words, the port is closed because the service isn't running or you don't even have Galaxy installed) Galaxy features are disabled and all is well..
But if the connection attempt get's blocked by a firewall and the game never receives an answer to its connection attempt, the game will crash. That is a very old bug that I have first seen and reported to GOG in 2015. It has been fixed by now but only quite recently. And GOG still has hundreds of installers with games that have not received an update since the fix and are still linked to the old buggy Galaxy dlls.
To get the game to run create a firewall rule that allows connects to localhost (127.0.0.1) but blocks any other connection attempts and assign the rule to the games. You'll see that they will work just fine then.
I was considering a solution along them lines, but i hadn't got into looking into it, localhost does indeed fix the issue in both games.
Image attached game loaded fine, as you can see localhost is allowed.
The thing is, Kingdoms & Castles only started in Jan, and prior versions never had the issue, so either they fixed it and broke it again, or are just very lazy on it.
It does cause an issue if you don't know what you're doing, it only took me a few seconds to setup said rule, i admit i'm more stringent on what connects out than most people, but then i don't use anti-virus/malware/spyware etc as i have no real need to.
Localhost is acceptable, still annoys me that i have to go that route though.
What games use Galaxy "features", as i'd like to test on one to make sure it is that, i figured Aragami would, but i've just blocked that with no crash whatsoever.