(Might be a GOG Galaxy glitch!)

My internet recently went out. I launched House Flipper to kill some time, all the options in the menu didn't work. Nothing I tried would make the game work. Once then internet came back on, I could play again. So I unplugged the internet cable (no wi-fi on my board) and the game wouldn't work again, loads into the main menu but nothing works when you click on it.

This is clearly a form of DRM running at launch. Unacceptable.

Update: Could just be a GOG Galaxy glitch? When launching directly from the game folder the game plays no problem.

hey can't blame me for getting pissed thinking a game I bought was drm'd right? :p

This obviously needs further testing to figure out what's going on, but good catch.

From the testing I'm doing it seems like a launch DRM check. After launching with internet on, it will function completely even if you unplug the internet.

Are you launching from Galaxy or is it a standalone installation?

Interesting. I do not own this game, but I had a quick look at the reviews and there is someone complaining about the same issue ("Needs internet connection to work" at January 25, 2021). Also, according to Gamepressure "Internet connection during the game: No".

Can you check with TCPView to see what kind of connections (if any) are created when you boot up the game?

You nailed it. I didn't even think Galaxy would matter, but it does work when manually launched without internet access. Through Galaxy is what's causing this.

Interesting. Sounds like a botched Galaxy integration or a bug with Galaxy itself then. Probably not deliberate DRM, but still not acceptable, especially since someone else reported it a year ago according to patrikc.

I saw the review mentioning the issue from a year ago, however it is not known if anyone actually contacted GOG about it, I checked the sub forum and no mention of this which is odd as normally when something like this comes up it is normally brought to community attention immediately.

I find it strange that 23 out of 27 people agreed with said review, yet no one addressed the issue so far. It would be nice to have some clarification on this.

several games have drm on gog. this isn't a first. gog supports drm and has for a while now.

If that was true they wouldn't have removed Hitman: Game of the Year Edition.

It has been shown that the game can start up perfectly fine using the offline installer and no galaxy so this appears to be an error with the Galaxy integration.

If you have Galaxy running it will replace all your game shortcuts created by the offline installers with ones that don't launch the game directly, but message Galaxy to launch it instead. The game might be detecting this, which would explain why it's acting differently when you launch it directly through the binaries.

What happens if you disconnect from the Internet prior to starting GOG Galaxy? Does the game still fail to work when launched via GOG Galaxy then?

I'm going to Invoke X to Doubt since I can run House Flipper just fine via WINE and it doesn't seem to balk about anything even though I'm certain that there's no networking protocol (it understands) availed to the game.

I'm guessing you've not read the whole thread. Seems to be a Galaxy problem.