If you also add the option to add games that have no launcher, then I will change my library to gog Galaxy, since I really want to have everything in one place, and got a lot of games on CDs n stuff. And atm only Steam has that option.

They said before in a few posts that that will be possible to add games without launchers.

I am still waiting for this to happen...

Any update on how the passes are being given out? It's pretty demonstrably not "first come first serve" as previously mentioned. I'm not gonna tell you guys how to distribute your own program but a bit of clarity on how things are chosen would be nice. I'm super excited for this program and I wanna work out how long roughly it'll take to get in. Thanks

I just got my invite today and have been playing around exploring everything in the new 2.0 client and I gotta say WOW, I am totally dumbfounded at all the levels of coolness I'm discovering. This is pretty mind blowing.

There are still some features missing compared to 1.2.x which I'm sure will get added in the coming weeks/months, but what features are there and work are so amazing. This is totally the future of gaming clients. I can't wait until 2.0 is out of beta, and to see what you guys do with it next.

So far I have imported my installed GOG games, imported my Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic Games libraries and explored them thoroughly as well as all of the new sort and filtering options, tried out the new bookmark feature which is pretty cool, discovered and played around with the cross platform game tags a bit, discovered you can completely customize any game's game card/icon/background art with your own images all in the UI, no editing files! Awesome!

I didn't realize just how many duplicate games I own on different platforms, but it's super easy to see now, and then to hide any dupes I don't want to see. Very cool.

Does it consume more or less PC resources than steam client?
If I wanted to import all games from steam would I be able to run Galaxy exclusively at this point?

A Steam game that would've required Steam to run will still require the Steam app to be started, even if you start the game from Galaxy, it'll just run it in the background.

What? So what is the point of this revolutionary platform? If I still need multiple clients to run the games, what would I be importing to Galaxy? It only makes sense to me if I can use one client and spare my machine. If it is only to look pretty, Ill pass.

An easy overview to see your combined library across platform and (more importantly for me at least) an easy place to install/uninstall them all from.

I noticed early on I rarely play games that aren't in my Steam library because it got so big, I usually found a game to play before I even thought of looking elsewhere and the first place to look was naturally the place with the biggest library. I'm less inclined to go looking for copies of games on older/other websites or loading up other launchers to see which games I have there.

Why yes I am still waiting for my invite after signing up in May, how could you tell?

I'll give a longer more in depth response, followed by a TL;DR summary at the end which people can skip to if they just want the bottom line.

In depth:
It's been running ever since I installed it, I haven't restarted it at all currently. It is consuming 250MB total memory including all Galaxy related foreground and background processes, and viewing the library All Games view which I just loaded, after a few seconds it idles with 0.2% CPU usage (combined total of all processes). Depending on which screen you're looking at (store, library, etc.) in Galaxy or Steam or any other gaming client, you may see higher or lower CPU, memory, and network utilization depending on the nature of the actual content being shown on the screen. Remember that modern gaming clients are specialized web browsers, so they're utilizing web technologies to display everything whether you're looking at the storefront, the library, an installed game's page, chat etc. Pages that come up which have animation or actively played video or other rich media content will consume more CPU and memory resources at least temporarily than if you're looking at a statically rendered page. So resource consumption should vary with any client depending on what you are currently looking at etc. Having said that, even though it is in beta where there's likely to be debugging code/metadata present, it seems quite lean to me and the display of things seems to be rather optimized and responsive compared to older releases as well.

Likewise, in Steam client it depends on what page you are looking at presently, the store, your library, a store page for a game, discussions, community broadcasts or other stuff, and how much rich media content is on the page. he core web browser engines in these programs do not use much resources on their own, it is the amount of images, video, animation and other things that consume CPU, memory and network which determines how much resources are used at any given point in time, as well as the optimization level of the underlying web browser and other technologies used. Both Steam and GOG Galaxy use the Google Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) as the basis of the web browser engine core, as do the majority of other modern gaming clients, so they all should have similar resource usage as a baseline. The actual resource usage at a given instant however depends on what page you are looking at currently and what is on it that might consume resources. This is also true for general purpose web browsers as well, it is the content shown which uses the most resources and not the programs themselves.

To answer the second question, Galaxy 2.0 doesn't replace other gaming clients entirely, you still need them on your computer however they do not have to be running all the time. Galaxy will launch any gaming clients needed to install or play a game in the background as needed depending on the game, in order for that game to interact with the platform it is on, and in theory shut down the client afterword if desired (however that does not yet seem to be implemented so you may need to manually shut down the other gaming client after playing a game on a given platform launched for now until they implement it).

So if you normally do not start any gaming clients when your computer starts and just launch a single client to play a game on that platform and shut it down when you're done, using Galaxy 2.0 to install/launch games on any given platform will mean that both Galaxy and the given game platform's client will be running while the game is played and overall it will consume a slight bit more memory to the tune of 250MB or so, but the client idles with negligible CPU usage here on my laptop (0.1 - 0.2% CPU). If you have a machine that is very old and low on memory then this may be a concern for some people who avoid leaving unnecessary gaming clients running all the time. If you have a more modern computer with adequate memory, the 250MB of overhead of Galaxy client running at the same time as Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic etc. is marginal, and if your system is memory constrained and the client idle, it'll end up being flagged to be swapped to disk anyway so any real world impact should be rather minimal.

Conclusion/summary:
Galaxy client 2.0 in its current state does not appear to use any significant system CPU, GPU, memory or network resources in my analysis when used on a decent computer made in the last 8 years or so with a reasonable amount of resources available for gaming. Having the Galaxy client plus another platform's launched gaming client running simultaneously to play a game should not produce any real world impact on system or gaming performance in ordinary circumstances at least as far as Galaxy itself is concerned in the current build. GOG seems to have optimized resource usage quite nicely over time and it appears it runs more optimally now in beta than the previous 1.2.x client as well. Thanks to this low overhead, most gamers are likely to find themselves happy with the new conveniences the client provides without noticing any performance issues when multiple clients are running to play a given off-platform game. Those who have really old and/or heavily resource constrained hardware may or may not experience performance issues if their computer is severely low on memory compared to an average modern system, or if they have a lot of other software idling in the background consuming resources.

Ultimately each person's results may vary and the best way to find out what the experience and impact on overall system performance and gaming will be is to test it on the given system first hand. It will only improve over time also as they implement missing features and further enhance and optimize the program. The conveniences the new client brings to the table are pretty innovative and well worth it in my opinion, and I think the majority of gamers out there will have a similar experience.

Hope this helps people to decide to give it a test run.

Take care.

The purpose of these new features is to try to have a single gaming client which can present one's entire gaming library across multiple gaming platforms in a single integrated and unified user interface, with the ability to organize, install, launch and manage games across the platforms in one place, as well as showing meta information such as achievements, game time, etc. across the platforms, and the ability (in the near future) to integrate the chats of all of the platforms and possibly other features all into one front-end program, rather than having to use a plethora of different front-ends.

In other words, it is intended to be a single front-end user interface for gaming across multiple platforms, avoiding the need to use multiple front ends.

Most modern games on other platforms integrate a variety of back-end services however as well, and need to communicate with the back end servers of the other platforms, and that is done via the individual platform's client libraries and background client services which talk to the back-end servers such as Steam etc. in order to authenticate with the platform, have access to download the files and install them, handle updates, achievements and other back-end services of the given platform etc. For this to work, the other gaming clients which implement such back-end services do of course need to be installed on the computer, and either running already, or launched in the background as needed for a given game.

Some games on other platforms may not use any background services or have any dependencies on the platform they are on, and so may not need the gaming client of that platform to be launched at all, or might only need it during installation, updating etc. perhaps, so it might be possible for Galaxy to be optimized to only launch the other client(s) when it is absolutely required. In the case of say, DRM-free games on Steam which do not integrate at all with Steam's APIs, I imagine Galaxy will only need to launch the Steam client in the background during installation, and perhaps not need to do so when launching the game to play it.

I don't think that GOG's goal here was ever to integrate the entirety of every game platform client, it's libraries and all technologies into a single gaming client that can run entirely standalone without requiring any software to be installed from the other platforms, and I don't think it will likely ever do that nor that any other platform will ever do that, as it would require basically re-implementing every one of the gaming platforms entirely within Galaxy, which wouldn't really solve any real problems nor save any resources or anything.

In short, it intends to be a highly convenient front end to managing all of your games, communications etc. in one place, which launches any necessary 3rd party software behind the scenes as needed, and even though everything is not fully implemented yet, it appears to provide a high level of convenience even in its current beta state which a lot of gamers will find to be a great improvement to managing and launching their games with little to no downsides other than perhaps some of the features/functionality that is not implemented yet.

Not everyone will desire or appreciate these conveniences of course, and some may prefer running all of the individual clients for various personal reasons rather than using Galaxy 2.0 as a one-stop game management tool, and that is of course fine too, we all have different preferences. The good thing is that many of us who do appreciate the features and find value in them now have the option to use them, but nobody is forced to use these optional features if they don't see the value in it. Nonetheless, a lot of us do see and appreciate the value of these new innovations, and that's ultimately the point of them innovating in this manner.

Surprisingly positive response from a senior forum user (since most of us are so cynical and crotchety). :) good enough for you to change your avatar text?

Ah, I didn't actually notice... ;) Ever since they announced the beta I really liked the idea of some of the features they advertised and have been waiting eagerly, so I was excited to finally get my invite. Once I got it installed and integrated it with 4 other platforms rather quick and effortlessly and had a chance to play around with it for a while I was rather impressed and wanted to share my first impressions with both GOG and the rest of y'all. I came in and posted but didn't actually read anyone else's thoughts/feelings/impressions yet so I'm in the dark mostly of overall reception so far. :) I just started catching up.

As with anything that GOG or any other store/business out there does though, there will always be people who love things, hate things, mixed feelings, excitement and praise, fear and doubt etc. It's all par for the course so to speak, could we expect anything less? :P

*2 Dollars have been added to your GOG account for this post-staff*

I kid, and all in good fun.....it sounds awesome tbh from your description.
Yes, but if we still need those other clients(and the login info/etc) to use Galaxy then besides keeping all one's games on one virtual shelf what is the major advantage over just running each client as needed or using another similar client already on the market?

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I thought it was to make GOG more appealing to those who like clients like steam's frontend and other galaxy alternatives. :|