I'm curious how many people who have considered gaming only on wiregapped windows machines so as to prevent telemetry, stealth updates, etc. How many of you consider this viable?

Compatibility. Wine's still not enough. For some reason i was thinking of wireshark at the time.

I am not familiar with the term "wiregapped", all I can say is I play most of my games on an offline machine and I like it that way. If I were to game while online, I'd use a proper firewall.

Fairy muff.

You should see the typos i catch myself making before i post just when i wake up. Yeah, i'm starting to think about the idea, myself. Not that i have the money for such a setup, but the idea of maybe a dualboot machine with linux and windows, but disabling the NIC drivers so i never connect on the windows side sounds interesting. If i need anything i can connect with linux without the telemetry and just deposit it.

I was considering dual booting, but I opted to keep them separate. My offline setup is about 5 years old (give or take), but still serviceable. Nowadays it is quite challenging to invest in PC gaming, still the best option though.

Yes, I always used to turn off the wireless, or unplug the cable when not in use. I have slipped on the the last year or so, not good. The wireless is on as the computer is far from the router, would prefer cable which can be unplugged, but disconnect the wireless should work. Firewalls are an option, never really looked into that.
I would point out, there is a thread on here quite recent about unity games “punishing” users who do not let it connect with slow frame rates. And I guess there would be issues if you had galaxy installed.

Have a look at simplewall on github. A decent option.

If you mean air-gapped (as in the machine itself has no direct Internet connection), I don't go to that extent. I do however set the firewall to "block outgoing by default, allow via exception" (whitelist) instead of the default opposite that pretty much blocks all telemetry in games, in installers, applications (office software), etc.

Thanks, will have a look.

I saw a program break through a firewall (including hardware) once, by posing as windows. It doesn't take much, unfortunately. Funny thing was, it wasn't even malicious.

Yes, it’s probably just safer aground to pull the cable out or switch WiFi off unless actually needed. Also a good test of which games actually work offline rather than be advertised as so.

I have a Windows partition dedicated to gaming, with Gog, Steam & co on it only having access to the OS SSD and the one where the games are installed.

So clients can have all the "scanning" or telemetry they want they don't have access to anything apart my save games.