That's how Steam took over, almost no one was happy at the concept of online activation when Half-Life 2 was announced, but if they'd actually protested it, they would have had to wait til things were redesigned before they got their shinies, and that's just unthinkable. So many people will simply throw away their supposed principles the instant they become inconvenient.

The industry is praying on this socialized apathy, pushing terrible practices until the masses just give up and say 'it's easier to just accept it and move on' which then leads to these lazy people to label anyone who dares to keep complaining after the issue isn't getting headlines a whiner... It's infuriating, giving in does not make a bad thing any less bad.

I just hope what GOG has tried here is NOT an example of this and is merely a colossal, boneheaded decision from an out-of-touch team... better to be guilty of ignorance than the alternative.

All this clarifies is you are not thinking this through properly and don't give the slightest damn about your sites supposed principles, nor the loyal supporters who have stuck with this site through thick and thin.

What you are proposing is pure, undiluted idiocy, it is deeply insulting to a great many of us and it is potentially commercial suicide. Have the GOG staff responsible read this thread and rethink this offensive decision, now.

Yes, absolutely. They never made any money of Windows… exactly. Even before the proliferation of the internet, they made all their money by selling cloud services. On top of that they never made money selling DOS either. It was all a hoax.

I'm not saying the game runtimes will throw up an error or CTD in the absence of Galaxy.

I'm saying that right now innosetup is the engine behind the gameballs. maybe gog would like that to be in the rearview mirror. then they can make a new structure for the installers, with new metadata and or other stuff to work with their new systems they're working on. with the goal maybe to not only make the user side of things go smoother but also their side with managing and maintaining their expanding library of games.

I see you have your popcorn ready.

I do not mind a client like Galaxy as long as that means we still have DRM free stand alone, clean and updated offline installers. So no need to roll back in my opinion, but remembering the principles GOG was founded upon, DRM Free offline installers, clean without bloatware, updated should be mandatory, downloadable via http. No opt out, adverttisement for Galaxy ok, I can understand that.

So let me get this straight - this god awful idea is going live on Friday (the day after tomorrow no less) and you don't have the answers yet as to whether Galaxy will be included in the installers? Unbelievable :(

GOG what has happened to you over the past couple of years? You used to actually stand for something good and the reason I loved being part of this community and buying my games from you was the sense of honesty and fairness associated with your name but you've just dribbled that away one GOG promise at a time. I have a feeling that you are going to push this through regardless with blatant disregard for how your customers feel and if this is the case the only way I'll make myself heard (no matter how quietly) is by never buying anything here again. And that makes me sad but at least I'll be sticking to my principles even if you don't.

Sorry I read that a little to quickly I think and okay that's a little more clear then. As I said though there is area for GOG to improve here. They still manually pack the standalone installers, hopefully someone is working on automating this process. To much resources is being wasted in having someone manually doing that.

Assuming they may eventually allow devs to directly push games to Galaxy (like they are starting to do with patches) they for sure need a system that can grab those games, package them and possibly automatically put them on the site. Otherwise it's not very efficient really, but GOG likes to test stuff before it gets added to the site so they may not want to go that far.

But I'm not sure how the current plan of bundling Galaxy really matters if that was the plan though... as I said if they give people an option to not use Galaxy any system they design will have to compensate for that, meaning it has to work independent of Galaxy. I mean it can interact with Galaxy sure, but it would have to function independently in my view.

^^ This. Exactly.

There is absolutely no need for 2 separate installers, if there is an account based switch, the download page could simply re-direct between the GOG Galaxy and Offline Files, depending on the user.

They could also make 2 simple options on the download page:
1. Download Offline Installer.
2. Download GOG Galaxy. (Files will download through GOG Galaxy)

They (GOG) know this, but are using an imaginary ignorant user base as an excuse to shoe-horn GOG Galaxy into the installers (and into all of our systems.)

GOG, if you want more users to use Galaxy, why not try making it a better program?

Testing Galaxy right now I can already see some problems:

1. Why are the backup installers significantly smaller than the default (unpacked) size in Galaxy?

I do realize that downloading the .exe files and unpacking them takes twice the space, but taking an extra 20 minutes (or more) to download files is not convenient.

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2017/05/866ace7f1c532fb88b4168eec740d6c589715700.png

2. Why is it that when I type a search entry the selector automatically goes from "Library" to "Store". Did you consider that I'm searching for something I already own? That's especially confusing for games like Fallout, where the current ones are not considered "owned" on the store.

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2017/05/00649d4711f65c8f869017a7a24086682d4d193d.gif

Edit: I just witnessed Galaxy delete an 8.5GB backup I had downloaded of Witcher: Enchanced Edition while I was downloading some other files. They were there just before, and I absolutely did not delete them myself. What exactly triggered that?

They never made a lot of money directly... indirectly though it sure did.

Galaxy does not directly make money for GOG, but indirectly, it absolutely does. People who want features like achievements and cloud saves, are far more likely to spend money here now than they were a few years ago. That is cause and effect, and Galaxy is a direct result of that.

Would it maybe be possible to just have something like a "global" opt out?

So once an offline installer asks you whether you want to install Galaxy you can choose "never ask me this again" after choosing "No"?

I wouldn't mind opting out once, but doing it again and again feels... inadequate.

Also, having to "opt out" again and again has a bad reputation in general and that might not be something that GOG wants attached to Galaxy.

I understand GOG's reasoning behind this move and think a "global opt out" (or whatever the correct term is) could maybe work fine for all sides of this discussion. :)

This is due to compression, the standalone installers and the Galaxy unpacked files use different forms of compression. GOG has recently added a new download mechanic and is slowly improving the size of downloads in Galaxy to make them smaller but I don't believe all games have been converted to this new compressed format yet. They also plan to use delta patching and stuff like that which will also save on bandwidth (again I'm not sure how far they currently are with that).

The search bar works with games installed (not games in the library, you actually have to go to the library for that) but you can also search for games in the store if you know what you are looking for. But yea you are correct it should probably show all owned games, not just installed game.

This is an interesting business decision. To sum it up, GOG is willing to piss of a large group of existing, established customers, in order to try and please the new users who may not be tech-savvy (which has to be a subset of new users).

Luckily, as a Linux user, I'm already a second class citizen here, so this doesn't impact me too much :)

Still, 2/3 of my library are windows based games (~300ish games), and I'm none too happy about the prospect of every update including a bunch of wasted bits for the galaxy installer. I don't really want to waste the space storing the multiple copies of the installer, and I'm on a bandwidth limited connection, so I don't really want to waste the bandwidth re-downloading the same wasted bits over and over.

---------------

There are a number of things I don't really care for with regards to Humble and library management, but Humble is starting to look like my default DRM free outlet.

As someone's who is currently diggin' thru 10 Linux classics (already) downloaded from long ago + a Linux user, I say:

https://img.memesuper.com/e4f046a3fcbb85685f771a6d601993cf_phew-that-was-close-yao-ming-that-was-a-close-one-meme_400-400.jpeg

;D

Further GOG Galaxy testing:

Now I just witness GOG Galaxy delete my brand new Fallout 1 backup (luckily I made a copy right before). Does it automatically delete the backup file if you choose to install the Galaxy version?? It would be convenient if it just detected the file and installed from there, and perhaps asked if you want to keep the backup afterward.

A tip for anyone who is interested in using backups with Galaxy:

Move your backup files out of GOG Galaxy folder.

Point the installer here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games

And Galaxy will detect/update the files from there.

For some reason, if you install to the default C:\GOG Games folder, Galaxy needs to update 150MB of files*. No idea what.

*based off Fallout 1 installation