You mean the same offline installers that are increasingly being neglected, lacking updates or not being rolled back to earlier versions when broken updates are pushed out? The same offline installers that when you have problems and try to get support for them you're told to use Galaxy instead?

Peoples wants to play the game, so they make the effort to learn it, while they don't give a damn about learning how to manually install it, manually update it, etc...

Mostly because it took a very long time for console to have any sort of "competitive" online shops, between, as you mention the lack of Steam-like sales / discounts, until not too long ago the lack of content, and also the impossibility to resell games. (which was something that was a lot more prevalent on console compared to PC)

To be honest, it doesn't level the playing field. It just doesn't.

If GOG's game releases start looking exactly like Steam's DRM'd ones, I'll just move back to Steam because they have a larger library, often have better deals on games via key resellers and bundles, and overall seem more robust which means that there is a greater likelihood of the service staying open longer than GOG (thus making Steam a better value for my money). Similarly, if GOG's releases look exactly like Steam's, there is no incentive for anyone to move away from Steam since GOG has far fewer workshop/social features than Steam. (Not to mention GOG has a far smaller library.) In fact, I would hypothesize that even if GOG could achieve feature AND library parity with Steam tomorrow, and they would be nowhere close to the scale of Steam even after 3 years because people will still not see any reason to switch services. So right there GOG has completely thrown away most of its market advantage by dropping their DRM-free focus.

In addition, if GOG is banking on Galaxy 2.0 to make them as large as Steam, that is just an absurd notion. There are lots of people (Epic fans in particular, ironically) that don't mind multiple launchers because "it's just another free launcher", and there are also alternatives like Playnite/Launchbox which do the basically the same thing as Galaxy 2.0. So Galaxy 2.0's cross-platform management is not necessarily a "killer feature" either. If GOG goes all-in on the delusion that Galaxy 2.0's cross-platform integration and DRM will magically make them bigger than Steam, they're going to spend themselves right into oblivion trying to reach that goal. (And selling games from a weak store like Epic through Galaxy 2.0 will just push users away from GOG and thus make this goal harder to achieve.) Look at the other launchers out there: Origin, Uplay and Battle.net have been around for a long time and none of them are bigger than Steam. And they even make some (or all) of their own AAA games exclusive to their launchers and that STILL isn't enough to draw Steam users away and make those services as big as Steam. Also, even though the Epic launcher has been out for only a few years, they still aren't close to as big as Steam. (Partially because EGS is a new store which does not offer much other than just games and partially because their anti-consumer business practices simply turn people off.) Also, the idea of GOG actually making money off of Galaxy 2.0 makes me nervous because that seems like the type of weak "product" that won't make much money on its own unless GOG starts deploying very shady data-selling tactics. (Which is how similarly simplistic services like Facebook make their money.)

So, what can GOG do to still be competitive? (In my mind anyway...)

1. They can keep doing what they have been doing for the past 12 years: releasing classic games that have not seen a release in ages. This is the primary thing that lured me to GOG in the first place (and the DRM-free mission kept me here). So seeking out the rights to more niche games that Steam doesn't care about would be great. (Games like Blade Runner, Metal Gear, and Silent Hill are absolutely perfect examples of how GOG has achieved this spectacularly in the past year or so.) Keeping a community games wishlist is also an excellent idea, and I applaud GOG for going the extra mile to seek out the rights to release some of them.

2. They can double-down on their DRM-free mission. The state of DRM today is absolutely laughable. Even the "mighty" Denuvo gets cracked in a matter of days, and there is plenty of documentation online to support this claim. So more education on why paying for ineffective DRM is a waste of a developer's money, and what the long-term consequence of DRM is for consumers (point to SafeDisc and SecuRom for examples) would go a long way in showing why GOG is better than Steam.

3. They can target more releases for new AAA games on GOG. What GOG will probably need to do is start lobbying hard for AAA companies to drop their DRM and release DRM-free on GOG. This should not be hard to do for reasons described in the previous point. Another statistic that would be interesting to devs would how many DRM-free copies of new-ish games are re-purchased on GOG by people that already own these DRM'd games on Steam. (I'm sure that this would not be a hard statistic for GOG to acquire.) So it may take a little legwork to lobby like this, but it would all be part of cultivating a larger market.

4. Advertise, advertise, advertise. GOG is not huge because it is not well-known. One thing in particular wat to advertise that I can think of is participating in far more game bundles than GOG currently does. This is how lots of people build their Steam libraries. Also, a partnership with Humble Bundle would be perfect because they also used to support the DRM-free mission. (And maybe they still do?) So a Humble Indie Bundle with GOG keys would draw lots of people here. I believe that I have seen one GOG bundle on Humble Bundle and one on Fanatical, but that's all the GOG bundles I can remember. This is a HUGELY missed opportunity. If people build large GOG libraries through bundle purchases, then they will be more likely to come back to GOG for non-bundle purchases. I know lots of Steam users that started using Steam only because they started buying Humble Bundles, and now they buy lots of games directly from Steam. GOG needs to stop missing out on this marketing opportunity.

So that's my thoughts on the situation. If GOG wants to "level the playing field" as you say, it's going to have to be through making a better product than Steam or offering some sort of incentive to use the GOG platform. The all-in-one launcher philosophy is not going to be that incentive, IMO. If you only use Steam, then you're only using one launcher anyway so that's not going to do anything to grow the user base.

Yes, and like I said multiple times, rollback never existed before Galaxy, during sometime the support was providing older version but it was a recent courtesy and never a "feature", and for the minority that suffer from lack of update (because even thought it's not acceptable and should be fixed ASAP it is still only a tiny minority of installers that are impacted out of the nearly 3000 games on Gog), they should be reported to the support and keep being reported if they are not fixed in a reasonable time frame.

Cant help but feel that these recent micro arguments are missing the point of this thread.

Gog have freely admitted that they now endorse DRM, end of story.

At this point, quite frankly I see no further point in supporting gog, especially when it would appear to me that supporting gog any further simply further advocates DRM.

I will continue to look elsewhere for my DRM free alternatives, even if it means directly approaching devs for purchase at point of origin.

So long gog, good luck.

Thanks for the info! Offline installers which are phoning home, *sigh*. Do only the Windows installers do that or the Linux installers too?

Galaxy is all about tracking users, GOG's web site is full of trackers and their personalized newsletters track every user action. Now also the offline installers?

Yes, support would offer older installers when there were issues, or if there was a widespread issue the installer would be replaced with the older version. It was never a "feature", because providing good customer support shouldn't be some special feature.

"Reasonable time frame" being a key phrase here; some of the reported games are years out of date, and people have been reporting them, and people have been getting very tired of reporting them.

I can. I've built myself a time machine. Guess what I found on GOG's servers... ;-)

Leaked Transcription of Dec 2021 End of Year GOG Meeting:-

GOG Manager 1 - "Well, there are now more people than ever using our Hyper-Launcher Galaxy 3.0 and we've just won our "Epic Games Salesman Of The Year" award but it turns out that games publishers have noticed that Galaxy customers who would have waited for a GOG version are now just all buying the Epic version, and decided to greatly simplify their own distribution logistics and reduce upstream support costs by not bothering with any GOG release at all. Most of the offline installer users have left too because we accidentally starved them of new releases for same reason. Also it turns out that our biggest competitor to providing reliable offline client-less installers were the "Eyepatch & Parrot Edition" 'scene' groups still in operation"...

GOG Manager 2 - "I told you not to listen to Zarek when he's on the Vodka. The original deal I suggested was to sell DRM-Free GOG games on the Epic Launcher, and get Epic to pay for our tech support..."

GOG Manager 1 - "Oh... Well there's always plan B. We just signed a deal with Valve to advertise Steam games here for free and pay for all their after-sales support. In exchange Gabe personally promised us a Half Life 3 exclusive!"

GOG Manager 2 - (*sobs*)

GOG Manager 1 - "We've also designed an Italy based theme for Galaxy. At least I think that's what he said. Something about 'Galaxy now embraces Di-Nuvo'. Zarek said it means 'I love freedom' in Italian"

GOG Manager 2 - "Someone please... just, hide his Vodka..."

Last time this things was brought up it was found that most of those "not updated for years" were not updated simply because the last update was only only impacting Galaxy related features. IMHO it would be better to list those games in a thread rather than mentioning some random names here and there, to have a real list and know how many games are really impacted and which are false positives.

It's naive to think that GOG wouldn't just burn all that money doing things you and I didn't ask for. That's the way it's been for years now. Someone up there has.. no, I wouldn't even call it a vision. Just a bunch of hasty ideas that they then start chasing whether it makes sense or not. Someone high up decided they just came up with the next great thing. Except that nobody cares. No matter, they push through, burn tons of money, and then get backlash & ridicule from the community as well as outside sources. Sometimes they backtrack a bit but mostly they keep doing whatever someone up there wants, not what the community desperately asks for. They even go so far as to lie about what's the most demanded feature.. what, most demanded by their managers?

Yeah that's not the issue here. They're "staying afloat" just fine. Like most companies, they've decided to grow and get ambitious and greedy and that has expanded their expenses. They aren't just staying afloat, they're burning tons of money.

Apart from bringing new games, the only thing I can think of applauding GOG for since the day I joined is their new refund policy. Everything else has either gone downhill or they're just doing things I didn't ask for and that have zero value for me. And there's a lot I ask for but GOG does not seem to care about any of it. It's about time I stop pouring money into GOG.

I often wonder how people buy one or two games on GOG then claim to "struggle" to understand how to install them and yet simultaneously have no problem downloading and double clicking on GOG_Galaxy_2.0.exe, SteamSetup.exe, OriginSetup.exe, uPlayInstaller.exe and now EpicInstaller.msi, or their GPU driver updates (nvidia_xxx.xx_driver.exe / AMD_xxx.xx driver.exe), or their 3rd party game support utilities (MSIAfterburnerSetup.exe, Ryzen Master, HWInfo, CPU-Z, GPU-Z, BorderlessGamingSetup.exe, xpaddersetup.exe, CheatEngine.exe, etc) or their various audio / video / photo applications (Microsoft / LibreOffice, Audacity, Paint.Net, VLC, Firefox / Chrome, PDF Viewer, Youtube Downloader, SSD Software (Samsung Magician), LED Controller software, 7zip / WinRAR, then flash their BIOS, tweak 30x variables for DRAM timing, etc...) But they collapse with exhaustion clicking 2x clicks instead of 1x, but only if it magically happens to be a game installer not an application / utility / driver installer that works in exactly the same way...

Those questions on how to get xyz installed or working have just been replaced with “how do I get my GOG working” meaning galaxy. Same thing, different words. It’s not done anything but ensure a dependant clientele.

But there's no learning involved... everybody using a PC already knows how to click on a link to download and double click on a file to execute.

My explanation: people get easily "stuck in their ways" and don't like "different". Steam has been the most popular standard for a long time... and different is bad!

I'm not sure on which side there is more confusion, on GOG's customers or on GOG's management. You are going to damage a brand established and propagated over years, the DRM-free shop, GOG's last remaining core principle. After all it's "GOG Galaxy" which will be the platform selling DRM-ed games.

There might have been better alternatives to not damage your brand that much, like selling selected DRM-free games from Epic and other stores. But you chose to start supporting DRM instead. How will that not damage your "remaining DRM-free store"?