I think even changing them on 25-40 games would become a chore. A lot of games here are actually less than 1gb. Especially, the old games. Besides that, it is always a good idea to back up and update your library on a hard disk.

25 - 40 games? How much storage do you have on your machine, I have 1 or 2 (3 at a push) games installed maximum.

I have 2 tb but I have 53 games installed and I still have 1.5 tb left including Windows. Most are under a 1gb. Why is that so hard to wrap your head around?

It would be a very tedious process for me to have to correct the shortcuts of all those games should something happen. That was my point. Nothing to do with a competition of how much space I have or how many games I *should* have on my hard drive. You want 2 or 3 games, that's fine but I switch games all the time. Sometimes I want to play Braid, other times, I want to play Darksiders, sometimes Saints Row 2 and maybe dabble in some Hitman on Thursday and finish off Sunday with Rayman. I see nothing wrong with that. You are pre-occupied with one, sweet. Nothing wrong with that either. I neither see anything wrong with having that many games on my hard drive, anything surprising about it or unusual, especially when this PC is built with *gaming* in mind.

You can even make shortcuts to your backed up games. Many games can be installed and played from an external hard drive with absolutely no issues. I have a microSD card with La-Mulana and it runs off that card without any issues. I've even run Psychonauts off of the same card. The only issue is the initial loading but after that, it runs surprisingly well and very playable.

This. Not allowing Galaxy to create shortcuts but instead manually creating one directly to the exe is by far the easiest solution. Otherwise Galaxy will now make shortcuts that link to Galaxy automatically whenever a game is installed or updated.

Find the game in Galaxy, click MORE -> Manage Instatallation -> Show Folder. Find the games application or exe file. Right Click -> Create Shortcut. Move it to the desktop if needed.

The other solution if of course just leaving Galaxy running and/or just launching games via Galaxy.

Hopefully in the future GOG will allow users to choose which type of shortcut they want during instllation or via a global setting... but I can understand GOG's reason for doing this as more games utilize Galaxy's features they want to make the process as simple as possible so less technical users don't miss out on those features which require Galaxy to be running.

EDIT:

Also as a nice benifit to this change, if one uses Steam and adds their GOG games as a third party shortcut you can now set it up so Galaxy also functions in the background. Meaning you can use Steam and still unlock achievements and/or use cloud saves via Galaxy while launching via Steam.

Both just having to be running in the background.