Non-Galaxy GOG is now officially almost(*) removed from CDPs business plan. Barring one instance(*) the word "GOG" only appears as part of "GOG Galaxy".

And their business plan includes an "Engaged community" with 3 hearts above it...

At least I cant find anything about honesty anymore...


Business plan update: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2021/03/cd-projekt-group-strategy-update-1.pdf
Site linking to it: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/strategy/
First found hint here: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/cd_project_acquires_digital_scapes_studio/page1
Announcement on CDP: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-updates-its-strategy/


(*) Only an image on page 4 remains. They may have been to lazy to replace it with a "GOG Galaxy" image or sth.
(*) There is also an "Online digital storefront" on page 5 - but this can be interpreted either way.

I'm not clicking on all those links, but without having read any of them, the premise of the OP becoming true wouldn't surprise me in the least bit.

GOG has been heading in a pro-DRM direction for many years already, via the gradual, step by step transition to Galaxy as a DRM gate.

It's nothing new that just came out of the blue for the first time ever now, suddenly & unexpectedly.

Yes, GOG's push towards more Galaxy and more DRM has been clear for several years now. By now, they are officially OK with moderate DRM, "as long as it doesn't affect single-player in a major way." (ponczo's statement)

The offline installers already recieve less care than Galaxy. Eventually, they will be discontinued.

My full local backup is ready ;)
Thanks to tools like LGOGDownloader, it’s almost trivial to maintain the backup up-to-date.

Frankly I wouldn't really mind if we have to get our games from Galaxy, as long as they actually support my system natively (Linux), open source it, and continue to be DRM-free by offering offline installers (even if we have to download them using Galaxy) that I can use to back up and install my games from (without having to use Galaxy once I've obtained the installers, as that wouldn't be DRM-free otherwise). Although I admit, I would miss being able to use gogrepo.py to automate my backup process. I'm not sure if backing up games using Galaxy would be just as seamless, so maybe that'd be another thing I'd want from the platform.

But as it is right now, the platform doesn't even meet the first point of supporting my system, so I'm pretty reluctant and disappointed about this news as it seems like it would make it very inconvenient for Linux users like myself to use it (we have to use another software called Wine to run Galaxy).

If GOG doesn't step up its game and meet the requirements I mentioned above, there'd be nothing stopping users like me from moving to a different vendor such as Steam instead, which more of my friends actually use, offer games at cheaper prices, and have native support for my system. Right now, Galaxy is just a crappier version of Steam Client.

---

Ok, for some reason I can't add a reply, so I'm editing this instead. This was my reply: You need an internet connection to get games currently, with or without Galaxy, so I don't think your point even makes any sense. I mean, sure I could understand if Galaxy took up a bigger amount of internet bandwidth than the website + games you download with it, but if you think about it, using the website means you have to download the resources (the HTML, JS, CSS and images) every time you access it, so it would use up more internet bandwidth in the long run than Galaxy, and the games themselves are often times multiple GBs of data, and I'm pretty sure Galaxy isn't that big...

Seriously you are grasping straw on an industrial scale here.

Gog is mentioned on page four as being part of the three companies being part of the CDPR group.

Then Galaxy is mentioned, one about online feature and another one about online community.

In short nothing new they want to put online stuff on Galaxy and use Galaxy as a multi-store client.

No, that would not be fine. There are people who have no or a shitty internet connection at home, and who have no chance to install Galaxy on the computer they use to download the installers. To be fair, those have received more care in the last few weeks. Updates and new installers are now up pretty quickly again. I blame the delays on COVID and the CP2077 release. And if installers are still outdated, we should be nudging the blues so they can fix this.

While at it, could you kindly take a look at this list: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_games_on_gog_where_the_standalone_installer_doesnt_includes_the_latest_patches

From https://docs.gog.com/offline-installers/ : Is that description not accurate then?

Here is the list of outdated offline installers (vis-a-vis galaxy):
https://airtable.com/shrldLsErlUf3eHqS/tbltXjS8fxEGG11eD

As you can see it contains tens of games, some outdated ever since the list was first created (Early December 2020) and much earlier.

The list is automatically updated every Saturday.

P.S. You might want to rethink your unfortunate "offline installers will continue to receive the same support they did in the past years" phrase, as your support for offline installers in the past years has not been too good, with some of them being kept outdated vis-a-vis galaxy for many months and even years. This, alongside your support for partial single-player DRM, is one of the reasons myself and many others now boycott your store (https://www.gog.com/forum/general/boycotting_gog_2021). Perhaps a better phrase would be "support for offline installers will improve soon".

Well, My guessing is that they whould be revised afterwards.
Anyway, What I understand here is that they are not created and revised directly by the developers, but by GOG. But Just Guessing

There is some bug in this list.

For example, Project Zomboid has stable(40.x) and testing(41.x) branches. They push both into Offline installers. The table reports that only stable is available, where in reality both are available.

Also,the game uses two fields for major and minor version, 41.50 is valid, 41.50.1 is not. Steam currently also offers these two versions, stable and testing via beta channel.

Probably the accuracy of that list should be improved as well.