I'm rather furious at gog. I ran a game in my library, and it completely hung my computer - a black screen, no ctrl-alt-delete, no alt-tab, no clt-f4, just a power shutdown. It's not the first game to do this.

I expect gog to provide some quality control. If I'm running Windows 10 64-bit, as I am, games should not do this.

If they DO need something to be done to prevent the hang, the game should make that VERY clear and not run without informing the player and until they're done.

I lost a number of unsaved files by having to power-off.

It's possible that your computer could be overheating. In this case:
* The real fix is to fix your computer's cooling. This might be as simple as removing dust from your computer, or it might mean actual repairs or replacing the cooling fan.
* A temporary fix is to underclock your computer. Changing the power management setting to "powersave" or the equivalent setting, listed as changing power, will cause your computer to produce heat. The downside is a loss of performance, but that's better than data loss or worse, hardware damage.

(Also, some games use all CPU or GPU power even though they don't need to. That you can complain to the developers about.)

It happens, nothing is perfect, nothing works all the time. For instance often when complaining people will post some useful information like the game in question, sometimes they do t however and we can’t predict this. You see where I am going with this.
For instance you cannot run a game in your library, do you perhaps mean galaxy which is a game client? If so, have you tried running it without galaxy. The big selling point of GOG is you can get the game installer (website, your account, expand your library, expand offline installers). That being said a completely dead system may point to more severe issues not related to the game or GOG at all. dtgreene has mentioned cooling which is a good check, also perhaps you have some malicious software on your system (well you use a game client so...). Have you done a full system scan, malware scan, remove all unused software and cleaned up etc.

You can check the game-specific subforums and see if other people have had the same problem, but if this happens with different games, the problem could be in your machine. Do you have the possibility to test the games on another computer? Does this problem happen only when playing GOG games?

dtgreene's suggestions are indeed a possibility. I used to have a computer that would inevitably overheat and crash during the summer months.

Games can't crash a machine. They don't have system access to be able to do that, at least on any remotely modern operating system. Only a bug in the OS can actually crash an entire computer. At worst, games can only unexpectedly quit. When a game supposedly crashes a computer—assuming there's no hardware fault—what actually happened is that it triggered a bug in the operating system, often caused by buggy video drivers. That's hardly the game's fault, and it's definitely not GOG's fault.

Anyway GOG can't control what sort of trash you might have on your computer. Surely you're aware enough to realize your setup is not necessarily the same as anyone else's setup. Nor can they be expected to serve as in-depth QA for games, where they uncover every possible glitch. QA is mostly up to developers; GOG would have presumably have gotten a general sense as to a game's stability when reviewing it for possible sale (and rejected anything that's obviously unfit), but that's it. It's not their job. If your computer completely locks up a lot, either you have a hardware problem or a compromised system.

If a game crashes, it crashes. Not everything else.
If your entire PC crashes, that's on you and your PC, not GOG or the game.

From your description your PC crashed, not the game.

Congratulations, the problem is PEBKAC. Do you think GOG would be selling a game guaranteed to crash a ratio of systems beyond that which would be a statistical anomaly?

I can't help but notice a few things are missing here.

A: What system is this.
B: What specifications are crammed inside?
C: What game is this?
D: Did you check the PC gaming wiki?

Well, why don't you give a list of those games that are doing that, so that we can even attempt to guess the root problem here?
Most likely GOG is not at fault here, although there have been some cases where they have been distributing games that need tweaking/patching to work, but not games that keep crashing as far as I'm aware of. OK, so now we are getting somewhere.
If you have "a number of unsaved files" it also means that you have a number of programs running simultaneously. It's never a good idea to have all your other programs running when playing a game.

If you do things like that, it's more than likely that at some point the computer will have some problems.

I had a GOG game crashing my computer too! It happened quite recently, actually.
Before I blame GOG, or the developer who made Guard Duty, I should first point out that I was putting a lot of strain on the poor computer.
I had three browsers open, I had two media player programs in the background, I had four files in LibreOffice, a FLAC player, and some small random programs like NotePad. Even with all that, the game actually played as intended.

But when I put the game on pause, and left it there for hours alt-tabbing it to background, the computer had enough at that point and simply crashed.

So as an advice that has worked for me, close most other applications if you play, and especially don't leave the game on pause for hours, rather save and exit.

So someone with the resources of Microsoft can't guarantee their OS can't be trashed by third party programs. That is not a problem. It is entirely GOGs fault for Microsoft's lack of Windows resilience.

I will tell you the one thing you will need to do for GOG to issue an ironclad guarantee as to whether the software they sell will crash and burn. You need to invent a program that can analyse another piece of software and detect if if the software will ever crash.

Succeed and you will make buckets of money - more than enough to buy CDPR outright.


Good luck. Known by the name of "halting problem", it is provably impossible. You will probably have to reinvent mathematics first.

i'm going to be completely honest... when you said you "ran a game in my library" i thought you meant you took a gog game (like, on a usb stick) to your public library and tried to run it on one of their computers. lol.

Also to consider:

"Please be advised that Windows 10 operating system will receive frequent hardware driver and software updates following its release; this may affect game compatibility." ...resulting in games locking or crashing.

Games can certainly instigate crashes and cause BSOD shutdowns to happen that would not otherwise have occurred had the game not been running, such as by the game highly stressing the user's hardware and/or drivers in a way that they would not have been stressed had the games not been running.

Even if the game itself isn't necessarily the direct cause in and of itself, running the game can still often be the catalyst which triggers the direct cause.

Stop buying computers that crash :P

Dude, you own over 700 titles here. How can you not understand yet that random games causing your PC to crash isn't likely the fault of GOG? You know it's more likely your system has a small problem. Maybe something rarely hit upon - some rarely used bugged dll which only those few titles are trying to reference. Maybe those specific titles runs your hardware too close to the redline and your system is hanging from heat problems.

Have you tried running these offending games without Galaxy perchance? Because if the ONLY thing these titles you talk about have is that they all get played via Galaxy... well...