…perhaps…
But requested a client that is required? Probably not…

And if not required, then certainly not needed bundled. But definitely include Galaxy bundled with a game if that game requires Galaxy to be something like a console OS. Absolutely then, for such a game. Though, I'm not meaning to open the can of worms of whether GOG should ever offer games like that…

This is stupid. If I wanted Galaxy I would have downloaded it. Keep your "optional" client out of offline installers.

Every year you do shit like this. The bigger you get the worse you become. What the hell is wrong with you? Who do you want to become? Steam? You sure as shit will never be close to its size. You had a good userbase and a great niche business, but you grew too greedy and too arrogant.

I doubt that this shitstorm will make you change your minds. You don't care anymore. You are just another disappointment in a sea of disappointments...

I had a lot on my plate in the physical world this past week, and with a hand injury on top, I wasn't able to partake in this thread in a timely manner. But so many people expressed my thoughts and sentiment about this, so all's good, and I owe a round of +1s once my hand recovers properly.

I read Destro's post about GOG's final (for now?) decision on how to go about this, and I'm shaking my head.

If anyone at GOG still reads this thread - the reasons given, that you still stand behind, are far from convincing, and the follow-up arguments you made to explain/support them are pretty condescending for both your experienced and inexperienced customers.

If new people don't know what GOG Galaxy is, what it offers, how to get it, and then complain, I seriously doubt that bundling it with each and every one of the standalone game installers will provide them with the answers they should be getting as soon as they land on the site.
If people miss it, and go straight for the standalone installers, the problem lies elsewhere - it's your marketing talk that has failed, as has your site design, if every instant of GOG Galaxy doesn't convey the message "hey, if you're one of those that want to get things done by clicking on a single button, and start playing on the spot, GOG Galaxy is what you need" to new users.

A very simple example - what does the link to the GOG Galaxy page do hidden in the "About" menu of the new nav-bar? Do you think that this is the menu a new user who just signed up will look into? I don't. The most straightforward approach would be to make it a button of its own, which on hover-over (since you love it so much) would give one the basics/highlights with a link to the download page. Same for the big blue "Try GOG Galaxy" button included in the details of every game in one's library. I don't know if the GOG Galaxy banner still floats on the front page as I killed it a very long time ago, but if it's still there, redesigning/reworking it to do what I suggested above is going to do a better job than bundling the client itself in the standalone installers.

Insisting on going ahead with this plan just reads as pushing as hard as possible to get the client on every single user's system. While I do understand the desire for the client to succeed, given the time and resources invested and still being invested, such a tactic, as many already said multiple times, puts you in the same category as companies pushing adware on unsuspected users. And standing behind your decision implies that you don't really mind being under that light.

I'm relieved to hear that there will be a separate set of clean standalone installers as I didn't appreciate the complete disregard for our bandwidth and backup HDD space, but past experience makes me sceptical reading Destro's post. I'm concerned this may mean even more delays in updates, and I don't quite see how this can be a long term viable solution.

Destro claims they listen and discuss our feedback internally; I'd really love to hear the thought process that led from listening to our feedback and the suggestions offered to the revised decision presented in his post as the best way to address this. So many manhours wasted to fix an issue that didn't exist in the first place...and so soon after we were told that providing a temp solution to restore very essential functionality, like notifications, was work not worth doing.
The most likely explanation I can think of is that someone at GOG may have finally realised that it's a pretty stupid idea to offer bundled standalone installers to those backing them up via GOG Galaxy, and decided to do the sensible thing for those users, and the rest of us just happen to benefit from it.


I'm adopting a "wait and see" approach for now, but am far from even mildly confident this will end well down the road; the cynic in me says that it's more like putting us on life-support until the numbers say it's time to pull the plug.



GOG has also said that our experience on/with the site would not change. Then came the unbundling. After that, came the NAS and chat, and along with it the loss of dozens to hundreds of PM exchanges for a good chunk of us. That were never ever restored. And won't ever be. Then standalone patches started to become a rarity for some games, and redownloading full installers were practically the only route to update them without using the client. And recently came the scrapping of the notifications system with the vague promise of a new one that would come eventually™. A new one that would not include game update notifications, however. Those would return at a later date than eventually.

There was also a time that GOG had more to offer than DRM-free. Which GOG doesn't even push like they did. You may want to check out their mocking video of GamersGate and their blue coins; it's quite entertaining.

So, forgive us if we don't take your posts at face value; some of us have seen how statements turned out to be lies when they no longer were convenient to GOG and it's new(er) plans.

On a side note, do you hang out with Ciris?

Maybe so, but I was having in mind the regular customers, not those that buy a few games and that's it. And from those that came with Witcher 3, I wonder how many have stayed here? All of them, half... who knows?

I see a wishlist with around 5200 votes for a game client. I know many more didn't vote, but still that's like 5%, if the whole GOG community is around 100 000 users, but how many are we? My simple guess is more than 300 000, but that's just pure speculation, could be 200 000 or 2 millions. And those who really requested a client, don't think they wanted this kind of "optional" - borderline malware.

My somber guess is, give it 4-5 years and all games will require Galaxy for installation, or the offline installers will be so outdated (on purpose) that very few will still use them. I do hope to be wrong on this, but only time will tell.

Since you mentioned this, a [url=https://www.gog.com/forum/strafe/first_patch/post7]recent example as to how well this works.


You might want to check out this GOGmix.

Thinking some more on this...

Quite frankly I tend to agree with what some are saying... it's not an issue of users not understanding how to find Galaxy, those who want Galaxy are already using it. You got ads for Galaxy all over the site, it's hard to miss (by the way why was the banner on the front page removed?).

If someone is coming from Steam (which a vast majority will be) and you got a nice properly sized banner advertising Galaxy on the front page they are already trained as to what to look for.

Why do you have to complicate this? I just don't see the point. I don't want to personally buy into the conspiracy theory's that GOG just wants to kill the installers and move everyone to Galaxy, but I think your words for reason here just don't make much sense. So I can see why people are wanting to freak out over this. This seems like a butch of unneeded drama.

If this is a real issue, then why not provide a simple pop up explaining what Galaxy is and how to download it when a user tries to download a standalone installer? Why not give users a setting to disable said pop up so your not annoying people who don't care about Galaxy more than once?

Why not handle this at the site level if your reasons are pure, rather than complicate matters with 2 installers that is just going to lead to more confusion? Sometimes us users just don't understand some of the choices GOG makes, because they don't make sense. You say it's to complicated for new users and your solution is to complicate it more?

Anyway, the real issue here is GOG not tailoring the experience to fit what the user is actually using. New users install Galaxy and then still have no damn idea how to install their games and the reason for this is simple: It's your fault. You again complicated something more than it needed to be, you have settings and butch of stuff buried in Galaxy that is impossible to find as a new user.

You built Galaxy to mimic the site, basically embedded everything into it from the site like the library. This works great on the website but is not a good experience in a game client.

Galaxy should have been tailored to the typical user using a game client. It's that simple.

You should have built what client users (ie Steam users) are used to like you actually planned to do at one point by having all games show on the left (even uninstalled games). That should have been the default setting.

And then what happens when a user on Galaxy can't find their games they just bought? They come to this forum where many are old users who are anti-Galaxy and those users point them to the standalone installers or the Downloader and this is how you end up with confused users. New users who would have loved to use Galaxy had they been able to actually find their games.

I know if I was new to GOG, and was accustomed to using Steam. The first time I used Galaxy I would probably be completely lost because of how Galaxy is laid out.

I'm sorry but your issues are issues of design, not something that will ever be solved by making things more complicated or by making separate installers. The good news is you have the power to actually fix this if you so choose, by actually spending the development time doing so...

This. I too have a feeling that a clear trend has been set in motion. Those who are vocal here about this issue, who prefer clean offline installers to an extent they will never use a client are very likely in the minority.

GOG, please all realize this, despite carrying the DRM-free torch marketing-decision-wise from the beginning to carve a niche for themselves, is obviously not fueled by this ethic, their impetus comes from a profit-oriented business perspective. It likely always has been that way, only now with the next bigger growth step in sight, it makes sense in that context to abandon their so-perceived principles. If there is more money to be made that way, they will make their decisions accordingly.

The only thing I personally want to state clearly is that I will not make another purchase on here when standalone installers will be gone. Not a bad run over the years, but that will be it for me. I might hang out on the forum a bit longer, but won't be a buying customer anymore. This issue is indeed that important to me.

My thoughts exactly. It's way too obvious that this so called "for the sake of clueless new users" is just smoke and mirrors for their hidden agenda, slowly paving the ground for the mandatory client in the future years.

Here's another problem with gog that's been getting worse for some time.
Even when games devs do provide a proper patch for their game, gog will just decide to delete all patches & previous installers & will just release a new one, meaning a whole game DL all over again.

Someone on Grim Dawn forums was asking how to DL the latest (1.0.0.9 patch). Apparently there was a real patch via galaxy, but no such thing appeared for standalone installers & no notifications.

Low & behold, a member of staff from Crate Entertainment replied:

"We talked to GOG and that appears to be the intended way to install this patch.

With the number of patches the game had, they decided to consolidate it all. I believe the incremental patches will continue with future updates though. "


Shadow Warrior2 had similar. There was a patch on steam (& galaxy if I recall) yet no standalone patch. gog also deleted all previous patches & installers & dumped a new one there, meaning a 10-20gb DL, just because.....

Oh & another thing. In the past I had problems getting Grim Dawn to patch so had to resort to installing galaxy to get it to patch, but there was a notice that

"That's right, folks, there are ZERO incentives to buy new games on GOG, but buy them anyway because we're the good guys!"

Right now the only GOG installers guaranteed not to have GOG Galaxy files in them are ironically Linux installer files.
GOG hasn't managed to figure out a Linux Galaxy client yet, so any/all Linux installer packages will be clean.

Downside to this:
Not all GOG games have Linux installers. Witcher 3 is a prime example.
Right now Witcher 3 is a wasted purchase for me.

I just feel more and more that GOG is not a true professional company willing to spend money equivalent to their growth. THey caught lightning in a bottle and ran with it, and when things began to grow out of their previous size, they think they can continue to do business as before, just with a few more people.

The real problem is that with growth comes change. And once you reach a certain threshhold, there are expectations of competency that didn't exist before. A broken feature here and there stood up ok to 5000 users. 100,000 users however create a load that requires different structuring of the code. This different structuring was added piecemeal without regards to how a changed bit of code here and there changes the code dependencies around it, and more things are broken, which are again patched piecemeal.

Another company would have realized this by now and perhaps rewritten the entirety of the site by now, but GOG hasn't shifted their paradigm yet, they're still thinking small, managing small on a big scale. It just doesn't work.

You have to adjust with your scale, and every model has a limit to the amount of size it can support. It feels like GOG's current business model is exceeded by their customer base and their desired client and vendor base. They need to learn how to think bigger instead of thinking small and magnifying that.

Is Microsoft slowly taking over GOG?
This slow and methodical approach to changing what is offered reminds me of Microsoft.

First you give the option to use Galaxy or not. Then you do anything you can to "politely" make the option of not using Galaxy, as much problematic as possible, without stopping it. At the same time you keep promoting Galaxy as the best way to do things. Now you start inserting Galaxy in the game install clients for no good reason. Why, because obviously there aren't enough people who want the client, but you still push and push and push towards it like Microsoft with Windows 10.

Oh you don't want the client, here, shoving it to the face, IT"S OPTIONAL, TRY IT! TRY IT! TRY IT! TRY IT!
Yes we include it (as option) with offline installation packages to push it, because people love the idea so much, we don't want them to forget there is a client! You love clients! YOU LOVE CLIENTS! INSTALL OUR CLIENT!

I said it before when news of a client first appeared. This will eventually replace any other option. Give it enough time. There will be some announcement, perhaps how forcing Galaxy will allow some AAA titles to appear or some other BS reason.

It's quite clear not all want to use a client, which is partly why many first came here. But someone at GOG (or above) think it is their way or the highway.

Tell you what GOG. You keep pushing Galaxy like this and eventually (I have no doubt) making it a requirement, and I guarantee you, at least as far as I am concerned, I am not going to be the one losing.

Oh this is rich.

Whoever is in charge of GOG, is an idiot or secretly works for Steam.