Nah it's a dependency that needs the file to run, yes it may break the old os the games worked on since the dependency may need more recent os to run them.
But it's patchable in case it need the galaxy.dll file to work. And if you used an old os and seen this thread:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/good_news_galaxydll_breaks_xpcompatibility_in_good_old_games

Then you can actually find out if a game may have been updated like the FATE series, i managed to patch the FATE galaxy.dll and found out it needed newer os dependencies.

Part 1 of 2:

I can see how one could misunderstand how this aspect of software development works as it's really only something that one learns becoming a software developer and gaining experience using dynamic shared libraries.

It is not a form of DRM but let me try to explain.

Software is a combination of code written by the developer/company that is creating the program/app/game/whatever, as well as potentially including software created by 3rd parties. As an example, many software programs use the open source Freetype font rasterization library because it is a lot more efficient and convenient to use a pre-existing available library that provides this functionality than to rewrite it from scratch on a program by program basis. Developers create libraries of code to perform a given function that can be shared between many programs as a way of reusing code in an efficient manner. The primary way this is implemented is as a shared library, which in Windows is known as a DLL file (dynamic link library).

Another example of this would be Google CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework), which is the core web browser functionality of Google Chrome, the engine if you will - isolated into a library that other programs can use to integrate web browser like functionality into their software. It is distributed as a DLL file as well - libcef.dll and you'll find that library is distributed with every program that includes its functionality, which includes many programs people use every day such as various gaming clients, Discord, and many other programs such as OBS Studio.

If we look at OBS Studio as an example here, the Google libCEF.dll library is used to implement the Browser Source feature in OBS studio as well as the docked browser panels feature. Since the OBS program has these features available built into it which use the libCEF library, that library absolutely must be installed on the system in order for the program to function even if the person is not actually using the Browser Source or docked browser panel features.

The reason for this has to do with how the operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac and virtually all other operating systems that support shared libraries) loads a program into memory, resolves addresses and initializes the software before handing control over to the program itself.

When the OS loads a program, one of the first things it does is look to see which libraries the program has been linked dynamically with. It then has to load a portion of the library into memory in order to resolve the addresses of symbols present in the library to initialize the software properly. This is true whether or not the given library actually gets used during this run of the software or not because it is a fundamental aspect for how dynamic linking works.

So in my example of OBS Studio and Google CEF above, a given person might never use the Browser Source feature built into OBS, nor the panel docks which use CEF. However even if they do not use these features that require CEF, because the program itself provides these features for someone to optionally use, the software must be built in a way that the library addresses are resolved at load time so the software can work properly if these features are actually used.

This is the exact same reason why the GOG galaxy DLL is present in all GOG games which have optional Galaxy functionality such as achievements, or other features. In order for any game to even be able to optionally use any Galaxy feature, just like using freetype library or Google CEF, the program must be linked with the libraries that it is using to implement any particular functionality so that the operating system is able to make these libraries functionality available to the program at run time should it end up using them.

So just because a program includes some DLL files in its installation and they get initialized by the operating system to resolve dynamic addresses in memory, none of the libraries actually get used unless the program actually uses a feature within the given library. So if a game for example has Galaxy achievements functionality available - but someone is not using Galaxy at all, perhaps having installed from standalone installers, then the Galaxy functionality is simply not used at all by the program - but the library still needs to be present in order for the operating system to be able to resolve the addresses it uses at program load time because that is how all operating systems work. The operating system has no idea which features or optional features a program may use or not use, it simply has to ensure that all of the libraries are able to be loaded if they are needed and the addresses are unique so proper operation can occur.

The DLL file itself contains the symbol table of all of its functions, global variables etc. present in the library which the operating system needs to access in order for this load time address resolution to function, and without it the program simply will not load because the operating system's dynamic linker can not resolve the addresses of the library.

Before shared libraries (DLLs) were used, all programs used what is called static linking, where when the software is built, all of the libraries it uses are linked at compile time into a single executable. There are no DLL library files as they're all built directly into the program/game itself. In this case there would be no freetype.dll, libcef.dll or galaxy.dll file present in the software installation and nobody would get all worked up about finding a harmless galaxy file on their hard disk because it would be built directly into the program itself. It's still possible to do this but is frowned upon because it is a bit wasteful of memory in particular if multiple programs use the same library at the same time. That's one of the benefits of DLLs, is that the code present in the library can be shared between mutliple programs simultnaeously and consume less memory.

<continued below>

Part 2 of 2, continued from Post 47

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Another thing worth noting is that if a program includes a shared library but does not actually use it at the moment, it consumes almost no memory. Libraries do not get fully loaded into memory, but are rather demand-loaded based on being actually used. They're loaded off of disk as a single page of memory (4k on current computer architectures generally), and other pages are only loaded if they are used by the software at runtime. So there is not even any increased memory usage from a program linking to various DLLs other than resolving the symbols in the library.

Apologies if this all sounds overly technical/complex to anyone, however it is a frequent misunderstanding that I have seen come up time and time again in the GOG forums and I don't believe anyone has ever explained it in this level of technical detail before, so I thought I would have a go at explaining it in an oversimplified manner in hopes that it helps people in general to understand why various DLL files may be supplied with a given game or other program even if they are not being used at all in a given instance of using the program. Everything I said above is also true for Steam's DLL files, and any other DLLs. A DLL file existing on the hard disk doesn't mean it is being used at runtime and doing things behind the person's back that they disagree with. It just means that the program does contain optional functionality that one can use and the library must be present because of that because of the way the operating system's dynamic loader works fundamentally on all operating systems.

Another thing I should point out is that some games on GOG come with DLL files which by the name of the file seems possibly nefarious, such as some former DRM schemes that aren't used anymore. Why would the GOG games come with the DRM DLL files then? Well, in most cases the DLL file present does not actually contain DRM at all, but is what is known as a "stub", or in other words a "fake" library of the same name the DRM functionality built into the original game expected to load, however GOG or the developer has replaced the DLL with a fake one that bypasses all of the DRM with code that does nothing other than satisfy the game and make it able to load. You can think of these stub DLL files as a form of a non-illegal crack, or DRM bypass if you will, tricking the game that had DRM built into it originally into thinking the DRM is present but in fact it has been neutralized and replaced with benign code that does nothing but bypass the DRM.

I totally understand why people get antsy when they see these kind of DLL files present and hate DRM and want nothing to do with it. I'm one of you, I fucking hate DRM too, with a passion. Some of it (like Denuvo for example) is worse than others, and some of it is relatively benign but still DRM (like Steam CEG for example), and I'd prefer none of my games to have any kind of DRM on them. A lot of the games that GOG sells in its store are distributed in their original form and the publisher/developer no longer have the source code and are unable to remove the DRM in the most "proper" way however, and so the developer or GOG themselves has to basically "crack" the game albeit legally to bypass the DRM that was once present. In doing so, sometimes some files are left behind that are inert, kind of like a dead virus - still present but harmless but required for the program to still work.

This is why we sometimes see files that raise eyebrows in some of the games on GOG. Having said that, there have also been a few times where some actual DRM or other unwanted software DID get released on GOG inadvertently by the publisher and/or GOG and they didn't realize it until someone here pointed it out, in which case they generally go and fix it after the fact. Oopsies sometimes happen like this, but IMHO as long as it gets fixed once it is discovered then no harm is done.

Believe me though, there are enough software developers such as myself here that if there was any real harm from some DLL file being present in a game that caused any real actual problem, voices would be raised until the problem got resolved. There genuinely is no harm caused by having galaxy.dll or steam.dll or other dlls present on your hard disk in a game installation on GOG, and the presence of galaxy.dll does not and is not forcing Galaxy functionality onto anyone, it is merely present as I mentioned above, because it is required by the operating system to be present in order to load the program because the optional functionality has to actually exist or it can't load the program at all.

If anyone genuinely still feels uncomfortable with all of this then honestly they should simply not buy any games here at all ever if that's what it takes for them to feel comfortable. If that is the case for someone then it is unfortunate, but things are not even remotely as bad as some people tend to think they are here. It is mostly due to misunderstanding over things that are of a generally highly technical manner that is not easy to really explain in a way that might comfort people.

GOG is not going to make any completely unnecessary changes to the way it distributes software simply due to irrational fears that some people have over misunderstanding for how things work at a deeper technical level as it makes no business sense to waste resources on something like that where no harm exists.

My explanation is both a bit long winded and also greatly oversimplified to try to be as short but thorough as possible. I hope that I've been able to help some folks understand a bit better about this stuff and that there really isn't anything to be genuinely concerned about with this stuff in general. In some rare occasions a game might get released that does inadvertently do something wrong by mistake and once we notice it and bitch about it, it'll get looked into and any issues of merit will generally get resolved before long as they've done in the past when such things have happened, but such cases are anomalies and certainly not on purpose. People make mistakes and we're here to slam them into the boards when they do until they fix it. But we also have to be rational about things and not fear something just for the sake of fear if there isn't actually a real problem present too.

When this problem gets brought up in the future in the forums, feel free to link people to my post, maybe it will help (or maybe not LOL)

Anyhow, happy new year everyone.

If that DLL is the only reason an older OS cannot be used to play the game, then it is of course DRM, let's be quite specific about that. It is managing your digital rights.

However, if that DLL is necessary for the game to work on a more modern OS, then it becomes a conflict of interest, and should have an option to prevent that ... bypass the DLL.

That is called duty of care.

Of course, if GOG provided access to their archive of older game versions, much of this issue would go away.

Whilst that’s all well and good, there is no reason whatsoever to have galaxy functions inside offline installers (nor in fact galaxify offline installers). U fortunately this is what has happened to every offline installer. And galaxy functions have be retroactively added to games which did not have them before. Therefore the pre really isn’t much difference between the galaxy installer and the offline installer other than the front end. From this process some games stopped working for certain people, backwards compatability is at risk, and future possibility of games running has been diminished.
All this to detriment of doing things which actually matter to offline installers, such as changelogs, proper compression, optional components split (like language packs).
If you are happy with that fine, but don’t try to make a technical argument for it. They simply do not want to support offline installers, CDPR and thus gogs clear policy is to push galaxy out and everything else can disappear. Technically there is no difficulty in having two build paths (most companies have several anyways for different operating systems for example). It’s not a technical issue, it’s a policy issue.
Galaxy installer = installer with all galaxy stuff enabled and present
Offline installer = the game only

I totally agree that the Galaxy client itself should not be present inside of the offline installers if for no other reason than that it greatly bloats the size of the download by a huge percentage of the actual game for a large majority of games, and having it embedded in every single game is very wasteful if one downloads all 700 (or whatever) of their games. I spoke up against that along with many others when they originally did it, and they backed off and provided us all with options that do not include the copy of the full client in the download, so +1 win for us all for that.

As for the galaxy DLL file itself however, it literally is just a small file that is inconsequential and causes no harm or problem for any gamer other than psychologically not wanting it to even exist. That's not a good enough reason for a game publisher to go and make 2 completely separate builds of their game for one platform for 0.0001% of users who have a problem with this though. It just does not make sense from a technical nor business perspective, and there are literally no consequences to not doing so. If every single person who has a problem with this just stopped buying games on GOG entirely, they might lose $500-1000 total losses over several years. The cost is just way too high to any developer to maintain 2 separate builds of their games, one that has all Galaxy functionality stripped from the executables for manual downloads, and one copy for Galaxy installs (and this assumes everyone who downloads installers hates Galaxy which is not true, many people want the offline installers but do also use and want Galaxy functionalty, so now we need 3 different copies of the game to please everyone). No company would ever entertain doing something like this when there is literally no viable technical problem caused by those files being present other than psychologically from the files being present and someone simply hating Galaxy and anything that contains that word.

I'm just being realistic here, no company is going to massively increase the costs of maintaining their video games like this on what is somewhat of a niche platform for them to begin with, just to entertain the irrational fears of an extremely small percentage of users. They'd lose more money to take on this additional and unnecessary burden that the money they'd lose if everyone just didn't buy their game who cares about this. The more special case demands that must be met by a gaming platform like GOG or their customers for publishers to release their games here and be accepted, the less that publishers will want to even remotely entertain the idea of releasing anything here. That's not what everyone wants to hear but it is just the truth of doing viable business.

It's not that it is not possible to do what is being suggested, it is that there is no rational reason to do it and doing it would come at a cost that is much higher than the cost of any sales lost by not doing it, so it just wont ever be considered by any game company to ever do this. It's already quite inconvenient for many publishers to release games here as they already have to cover a lot of cases that they don't have to be concerned about on other platforms. Making it an even higher and more finicky platform merely makes less publishers want to bother to sell games here at all.

Also if anyone pays attention to CD Projekt's financial statements, GOG is not profitable, they are losing money right now and have been for a while IIRC. There is no way that they will ever consider adding more complexity to their release process or putting an even higher burden onto publishers to sell their games here, as it would only cost them more in losses. Sustaining losses due to bad decisions like that long enough would eventually result in them closing their doors, and at that point what is present or not in the offline installers doesn't really matter as they'd no longer be downloadable anyway once they go out of business from making bad decisions to nitpick things from publishers that have no real important relevance.

With respect to backwards compatibility, that is of course something of concern for sure. Ultimately it is up to each individual game publisher/developer what features and functionality they want to put into their games, and what operating systems and versions that they choose to support, and they're free to change that to some degree or another over time too. I am not sure there is an easy answer for this that would satisfy every single gamer out there while also being feasible to the game publisher/developer and GOG, so somewhere along the way a judgment call has to be made by the publisher to do what they think is best or are willing to do or not do. In turn we either spend our money and get what we want, or we don't spend our money because we don't feel we're getting what we want.

I own some games here that worked fine on XP that don't work on Windows 7 or 10 anymore. Some can be coaxed to work through 3rd party hacks or tricks, but some just don't work. That sucks, but it isn't the end of the world for me for a $2 game or whatever. I don't expect these companies to support their games forever on all platforms in the future or the past, as much as it sucks if a game doesn't work any more on a newer or older system or hardware etc. I think we have to accept a certain amount of things will just not work and move on. It's also ok to be upset or bitter about it too if it really does affect someone strongly, and I can't say I'd never feel this way about something myself.

It's nice if they update a game to add new functionality or modernize it in some way, if they at least keep the original version around for backward compatibility or similar too but that doesn't always happen.

Changelogs seem to be poorly kept more and more over time which really sucks. Also agree about splitting out things like language packs where possible, using better compression etc.

<continued below>

Sorry, but it’s not “just a small file which is inconsequential and causes no harm”. Unless you are specifically testing it each and every time, you do not know what it is doing. It is also consequential, for instance Titan quest recently had a build - and this shows how simple, and at no cost - which would not work without a load of dlls , galaxy, steam, epic, discord etc. present, all doing whatever they do. Now after this was pointed out, thq pushed out a new build where only galaxy.dll was needed. This clearly shows it is simply a matter of build paths. There should be a clear distinction between games which are designed with additional functionality and those which are not. Otherwise the next version of a game you download could simple include loads of links to sites, not work without and not be compatible to your OS. Titan quest for instance used to work fine without all those dlls, now you are required to have them doing whatever they do, we shouldn’t need to be boxing apps and blocking firewalls just in case some rogue dll decides to transmit all our data off when we are using an “offline” installer for a game.
This has of course only come about as they want to emulate steam, and CDPR are pushing for the always online via galaxy world, which one, will sneak into something you download (again unless you are testing it all each time.

<continued from post51 above>

GOG has clearly put less priority on the offline installers over time and I myself am quite disappointed in them for that, as sometimes it takes months for a game to have its offline installers updated which is frustrating. I honestly don't think that they are doing this on purpose to say "fuck non-Galaxy users, this will get them to use Galaxy". I think it is because they lack manpower to keep up with everything they've set themselves up to do. It's become bigger to maintain all of this stuff than the amount of money they're making to pay people to maintain it, and it has really started to show over the last 2 years.

I believe their lack of profitability is what is holding up progress on the most egregious of problems on the website, the installers, the forums, the review system and virtually every aspect of the whole experience they offer, including Galaxy client which hasn't had any major changes in a long long time now. I'm not totally fine with everything at all. But I think it would be very poor judgment of them to focus on extremely minor issues like Galaxy DLL being included in offline installers which has no real consequence to anyone really, when there are extremely higher priority issues that desperately need manpower put into it that have been neglected for far too long now and show no signs of progress. It's a matter of prioritizing the most important things first and going down the stack. Something like this is super low priority to the point where while I know many people don't want to hear me or anyone else say this... it is just never ever ever ever going to happen. That doesn't mean you or anyone else shouldn't speak your mind on it though. You should! But realistically it is never going to happen. They are never going to maintain a Galaxy client copy of a game AND a downloadable installer that includes Galaxy client, AND a downloadable installer that does not include Galaxy client but does include the Galaxy integration functionality, AND a downloadable installer that does not include Galaxy nor Galaxy integration functionality. It's just way too much work for no real gain, and with the amount of manpower they have available I don't think they'd ever do this with 50 times as many developers/employees as they have right now.

I just do not see a real problem with this specific issue being raised honestly, but that does not mean that I don't see real problems here. They have a lot of problems that need solutions that haven't been dealt with or discussed over time and may also never get addressed. I just don't think it is realistic to think that they would ever try to address the issue being raised when there are so many more much much more important issues that have never been addressed which affect the entire customer experience of a much broader number of customers. And in the case of this specific issue, it would absolutely require the developer themselves to do the work as it has to do with how the game itself is configured at build time and linked. The developer would 1000% have to conditionally compile a version of the game with Galaxy support and another without it, just for GOG alone, on top of their build for Galaxy. I just don't see how any developer would ever consider doing that for any reason, no matter what justification a customer or group of customers might have for wanting it.

A final thing I'd like to point out is that you are suggesting the offline installers should not have any Galaxy functionality in them at all. The problem with this is that it implies that everyone who downloads the offline installers hates Galaxy and does not want any Galaxy functionality built into their offline installers, which isn't true. Many people prefer to use Galaxy as their main interface to GOG, but also like the fact that the company provides offline installers so they can have local backups of all of their games, and they want the Galaxy functionality to be present such as achievements etc. If one has downloaded all of the installers to have offline backups and wants to install a game with intention of launching it and using it from Galaxy client, it can be a lot faster to install it via the already downloaded offline installer rather than installing it via Galaxy and effectively redownloading all of it again. That's particularly important for people on slow or metered connections.

So they'd have to provide:
- Galaxy installation
- Offline installation with Galaxy features available
- Offline installation without Galaxy features available requiring game publisher to provide 2 copies of binaries, with and without integration.
- Offline installation with Galaxy features and the Galaxy client downloader stub.
- Offline installation without Galaxy features available requiring game publisher to provide 2 copies of binaries, with and without integration, plus the Galaxy client downloader stub.

That's 3 different game builds with 5 different distribution mechanisms. That's just too much, especially with 99.99999% of customers not ever caring about any of this.

Now I know that what I'm saying is not what you and possibly others want to hear of course because I'm basically saying "you are not ever going to get what you're asking for here right now or ever in the future no matter how much you want it", but please know that I'm not saying it in a dismissive way. I'm merely sharing my opinion about why things are the way they are, and why I do not think that it is going to change now or ever in the future for any reason realistically because the cost and complexity of trying to do this would be far greater than any benefit to GOG as a company or to any game publisher to bother with IMHO, so I just don't think it will ever happen.

It's not about what I want or don't want, or what I think is right or wrong, it's all about trying to rationalize whether anything like what is being asked for is likely to be considered rational and feasible by the game publisher and GOG, and I don't think it will ever be. Maybe I'm wrong, time will tell.

Sure, there are occasionally some screwups that happen like you describe above. At the end of the day people are still human of course, and mistakes occur. I'd say it is due to a lack of automation and quality assurance testing both on the GOG side and the publisher/developer side. They need to be called out when it occurs and then fix things of course. I do hope when things like this happen that they don't "just fix it" though, but that they look at why the mistake happened in the first place and put the proper automation and/or procedures in place to either ensure it will never happen again, or greatly decrease the likelihood of it happening. Also known as quality assurance testing. :)

<queue corporate excuses from GOG and publishers about COVID blah blah blah>

I also agree that we shouldn't have to be using firewalls to block apps from doing things we disapprove of. That's really annoying that things like this are not included in the quality assurance testing pipeline also, it would IMHO be trivial to include packet filter based detection and reporting of this type of stuff on testing systems. I also very much disapprove of companies including GOG and CDPR having any form of default-enabled telemetry gathering of any kind, whether it is "anonymized" or not, and yet all companies do this anyway and make it either opt-out or "tough luck", thus again requiring client side packet filtering to block. That's annoying but sadly essential to anyone who cares about it such as ourselves.

I don't see GOG as forcibly pushing Galaxy on people though, but I do believe that they have indeed neglected non-Galaxy users for some time now. I use Galaxy personally but it annoys the hell out of me how little attention the offline installers and other things have gotten for a long time now. The majority of gamers do use gaming clients and prefer to use them so they're just falling in line with the entire rest of the industry in terms of having a client though. They need to appeal to a broader audience if they want to have a remote chance at surviving in this highly competitive market. The problem is that they aren't putting enough resources into making it a fully polished experience for everyone, it's still a bit rough around the edges. Plus due to what appears to be too much manual human intervention in the whole pipeline rather than automation it seems they persistently are open to human error in terms of accidents happening, missing downloadable installers, missing patches, missing changelogs, missing <insert big list here>.

It's not impossible for them to sort all of this stuff out, it just doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon sadly. I get the feeling that the parent company just doesn't want to sink more financial resources into the GOG storefront as a long term investment, or that's what it seems like over time.

Perhaps GOG could consider having a free game per week like Epic does. I thought Epic was crazy doing that all along for 2 years now until leaked info came out during the Apple vs. Epic lawsuit showing that Epic makes more money from new users coming to their platform for the free games than they lose giving away the free games. I can't help but wonder if GOG could successfully do this also. Galaxy client is like 1000 times better than Epic Games gaming client is.