lol 150 mb for something like castles 1, or wing commander 1 would be pretty insane. lol

Yeah, for someone who also makes secondary backups of some games to USB drives, that's too much for me.

So, it is easier for people, who "just grab a game and that is that for them",to install Galaxy first and use it to install/play and manage the one game they grabbed instead of only installing the game itself ?

Could you perhaps provide me with necessary and easier steps for a user to do the installation with galaxy without having Galaxy on their system first? Just which steps.
And do not tell me that Galaxy has the magical property of figuring out why for example an old game does not run on your modern machine and take the necessary steps by itself to tinker with configurations - this argument is bullshit.
Cloud saves are not the topic here.

I can tell you the reason for all this, it is in the first sentence you wrote:

"Some people just come to GOG, grab a game, and that's that for them."

There it is, you want the guy who grabs just a game and that is it, to start Galaxy everytime he wants to play it, preferably Galaxy itself starts with the system start-up. So you can throw advertisements tailored to his game preferences in his face, which you know through Galaxy and his gaming behaviour, the data you have collected about that guy. You want to bind the one time customer to your client and with that to your store. I think I can see the roadmap here: our games are all DRM free, you just need Galalxy.

Honestly, the only defining characteristic this company has are DRM free offline installers and these keep it alive. If you want to go the Steam way at the end, you will go down. I do not mind a Galaxy advertisment through the installation, you advertise games anyway while the installation runs, the opt out is a no go.

*sigh* As I pointed out earlier, of the 102 games on the list you provided there are only 8 that support Cloud Saves. Whoever you are trying to help will be misled 94 out 102 times: their Cloud Saves won't exist.

If you would have started with the current 48 games supporting Cloud Saves then your statement would have been believable. As it is now, you're just weaving a dream.

It is always annoying to have to make sure to uncheck boxes in order to avoid installing unwanted software. If I use an installer for a piece of software 'A' then it is because I want to install 'A', not 'A' and 'B' and 'C' etc. Having to carefully look for boxes to uncheck to make sure that only software 'A' is installed is a pain. Inevitably you are going to miss something or forget to uncheck something and end up with additional software that you didn't want and you'll have to clean it up.

As for it being easier for unexperienced users, why not just have a big button on the front page of gog.com or in their library for downloading Galaxy. Put some big text next to it that is easy to spot and read that explains that Galaxy can make it easier to install and manage your games. This would be helpful for newbies and could easily be ignored by those who don't want it.

Personally I have nothing against Gog Galaxy in general and I would use it as a replacement to the downloader to download offline installers. What I mean by this is that I would like to use Gog Galaxy to download the offline game installers, not install the game via Galaxy. Note that I have not tried Galaxy yet so I don't know if this is already an option.

I really hate to say it, but if they are actually sticking the full blown Galaxy client inside every single installer, that's going to be 80-100MB of data per installer. Multiplied times 540+ installers is more disk space than I care to waste for unnecessary bloat. Even 1MB per game is still a half a gigabyte.

As several have stated in the thread so far - the entire active forum community has universally come together to express distaste not only for this feature and its default setting, dislike of GOG just jamming it down everyone's throats universally regardless of their explanation/justification, that it is remarkable everyone seems unified in feeling about this with very very few exceptions from both pro-Galaxy users such as myself and anti-Galaxy or Galaxy-neutral customers.

I think the truth of the matter is that GOG is growing ever more and more popular to the masses out there and their customer base is growing at a rate that outpaces the rate that their employee count is growing.

Their support group and perhaps other groups are constantly overwhelmed with more work to do than people to do it and they are trying to find ways to mitigate customer support request volume and other interactions with customers as the business continues to scale. They are probably seeing a great increase in the number of non-technical customers who are used to other gaming clients and one-click or very-few-click installation buying games and having absolutely no idea how to download them and then overloading support with inquiries. While it may be fashionable for some people to call such customers "stupid" in anger or whatever, they're not stupid, they're just people who have money to spend like any of us do and that's certainly how GOG sees them.

GOG isn't going to tell customers "It's not as hard as you think stupid, just do this process that is more complicated to you than anywhere else you shop from your own perspective and don't be such an idiot." for example. They want the business and they're going to look for common problems that recur again and again and try to come up with solutions to meet the wide variety of customer needs that arise as they grow. That makes business sense. I think that is ultimately what they're doing here, trying to mitigate an influx of people who buy a game here, can not figure out how to download it or install it, how to get cloud saves to work or other features that they expected to work and which are part of Galaxy and perhaps the customer has no clue about that so it costs GOG money in support to have to deal with it frequently.

So they forcibly make Galaxy the default and claim it is "optional" because everyone who is smart and knows about it can opt out 50000 times every time they want to install a game, and this makes it easy for the average schmuck that doesn't know how to tie their own shoes to get the best experience possible.

I get all of that. But there are better ways to do this that could have been thought through a LOT more clearly and made things easier for new users without massively inconveniencing the entire rest of the user base in the process. What surprises me more than this though is that not only did they do this, but it seems like they either did not have the slightest most remote idea that the community would even slightly be upset about it at all, or they just didn't care.

Maybe they're getting to the point now where they know that every single change they make is going to be met with some level of angst, some level of resistance by the community no matter how universally good or bad it is, and whether it has any actual negative impact or not on those who complain the most about a given thing. Perhaps they're realizing this now and don't want to dodge the obstacle course of reactions every time now so they're just ploughing ahead with decisions like William Adama on Battlestar Galactica "... sometimes you gotta roll the hard six...", an expression that means roughly the same thing as "In order to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs".

Everyone is getting a GOG omelette for breakfast every day going forward it seems. Maybe we'll get tracking and advertising spyware toolbars installed into our web browsers yet by default, or McAfee Antivirus installed by default if we don't uncheck them during installation of every single game every single time in a future update. Perhaps it'll be part of a deal they negotiate with McAfee to ensure that Galaxy is never flagged accidentally as malware by the software. "Yeah we'll work out something to automatically flag your software as safe each release if you include our software in your installation process." or something like that.

But it's "optional" right? You can manually opt-out of 500 things during install, so it's pro-consumer choice YaY!!!

Not.

GOG: We like genuine options, but what we want more than options is your respect as customers and not as sheep. Respect and trust are things that are hard to earn and easy to lose. Unilateral moves like this cause many people to feel a loss of respect from GOG, and in turn to lose some respect and trust towards GOG as well.

While I tend to support things GOG does more often than not as being good in the bigger picture of things, this is one thing GOG has done that I can not support nor offer words in GOG's defense over at all. It would practically be forum suicide to do so and that's really saying something.

My biggest fear with respect to GOG now, is wondering if I've put TOO much trust into GOG and your intentions with Galaxy over time, and if my respect and trust is going to come back and bite me in the ass now or in the future. It's the first time I've really felt like I had to actually wonder about this and not be able to give GOG the benefit of doubt. I feel genuinely unsure about this at the moment, and after the fun ride that GOG has been for several years now it increasingly feels like the honeymoon is over or coming to an end.

Maybe that is just the ultimate nature of business.

I'm late to the party here and pretty speechless.
All I can say is terribly handled, Gog.

EDIT: Finished downloading the final updates of Galaxy-less installers. We'll see how bad this gets.

Yeah, I really hope GOG is smart enough to include only a small installer stub and not the whole freaking 150MB Galaxy installer in all those games. I can see only negatives for the full, both for GOG and the users. GOG would probably have to update the full Galaxy installer in those game offline installers far more often than the stub, and for us users it is of course much more wasted space and bandwidth.

I just hope to dear God that some money whores or big corporations didn't buy too many stock shares of CD Project, and are now causing issues and deliberately fucking GOG up.This sudden,non-logical behavior fits the "yay i bought a lot shares and i will Steam-ify it" sindrom very well.And stock transactions happen mostly behind the scenes,and coupled with the fact that everything is under NDA's :(.... Cheers

the problem is, what's the alternative? the installers need to work offline. therefore they have to test cert and package some kind of ship version of galaxy in the installers otherwise Galaxy can't work in an environment with no internet connection. they're not idiots, they saw this too. you could have it that they just include some kind of net installer in the gameball that would take like a megabyte or so but then that would fail with no internet. so for somebody who throws a gog game on their laptop and then installs it without internet, they don't know where the Galaxy is. it's not ideal from the standpoint of deploying the client successfully from a purely technical standpoint. I get that that's reaching though. I don't see why they wouldn't install the gameball at download time. I get that's... yeah. I get that.

here's the thing though. if they are working on this piece of software, Galaxy, to manage and manipulate their game library and deployment of their licensed content and user facing environment, all this stuff right, then they are building everything around it. everything. it may be, that, in the future, or right now, Galaxy is responsible for handling configurations, data, crypto, all this stuff. it could be that the future versions of the gameballs will require Galaxy in order to deploy.

it's like right now, it's innosetup, and that blows up everything and it works. as they bring in multiplayer, connectivity, cloud saves, social whatnots, all of that adds complexity and maybe a lot of that doesn't have any bearing on the function of a game installer but when you're talking about what is the thing that programmers are working on, where are the programmers putting their work, they're putting it in one area/on one thing, at one time.

so what I'm saying is, it could be from their perspective, Galaxy is going to become the brains of the thing. so instead of having, you know, Galaxy do the multiplayer and the cloud saves, and innosetup do the gameballs and whatnot, everything will shift more towards Galaxy because then that's easier to debug, to test, to write, to deploy, to manage and so on.

now I'm not saying they shouldn't also do the work for the offline installers to be able to manage themselves. when you're talking about the games not being able to install without the thing that's being created for the connection and the cloud saves and the platform and so on then we're starting to get into DRM slippery slope stuff here I realize. which is... really bad. I'm saying from a technical standpoint, there could be practical engineering reasons for them needing Galaxy in the gameballs right now or wanting it there for the future.

anyway originally I just wanted to reply to this to say it's likely they'll put some kind of long-term version of Galaxy in the installers that will update immediately upon run, if it can, and they'll probably update that freeze version of Galaxy through the library as needed, selectively as opportunities to do so happen like new patches and so on, and across the entire library periodically or when a major milestone is hit.

If GOG had made a post like this and then asked for feedback, it would have increased my respect for them.

I'll come out of stalking mode for a minute to add a +1 to the backlash count.

Bad idea.
I removed everything on my wishlist and I don't see myself buying here in the future.

That's an interesting thought. As you mentioned, it does bring up that DRM slippery slope, but I think it could be a perfectly valid reason to test the waters of integrating some aspects of Galaxy into the installers. If that is in fact part of their reasoning and they had communicated it as such, I think this could have been a more positive or constructive discussion.

I know I've said this to you before but I have to say it again. this is the best avatar on the forum.