On a trail of threads leading back to the creation of Galaxy, a lot of people have said they would never use any client. I count myself among them. To those people and to myself I say, with dread and horror: imagine the following.

You're a grumpy old gamer, forged in the fires of the olden gaming days. The thought of installing your games manually brings you solace, and that message: "Now insert floppy disk 7 out of 29"... perhaps not this one. And that message: "Now insert CD 2 out of 3" puts a silly smirk on your now wrinkled face. You still remember the night when, as a young lad, you went over to your friend's house, lured by the promise of playing the latest AAA game, and you first saw him log onto a client. Your face turned pale, you rushed to the bathroom and spent the next 30 minutes trying to rinse that abomination off of your retina, but it was still there to this day, haunting you...

You are now in some serious trouble. You find yourself in the middle of a large, dark empty room, tied to a chair. There’s a bright lamp shining forcefully in your face, but nothing you can do about it. In the distance, you start hearing some strangely muffled footsteps creeping ever closer. Shouldn't shoes or boots give off an eerie, harrowing echo when coming in contact with the flat concrete surface you and the chair are on?

The mystery is soon dispelled, for standing right before you, coming out of the glare of the lamp, is a man-sized furry GOGBear, as described in the GOG Olympian legends of old overloaded servers. In his surprisingly nimble paws, he's holding an empty revolver. He flips the barrel out, inserts a bullet, spins the barrel and flips it back in, then points the gun at your head, as you whimper defenselessly.

He then proceeds to utter the following, in a calm, yet menacing voice: "Listen here, off-liner, I hear you have some issues with my strategic vision. But I'm gonna let you off easy today, 'cause I've known you for some time now and you’re a valued customer. There's only one thing I need you to do for me, in exchange for your life and freedom: use Galaxy for the rest of your life. If that's not satisfactory, then you and I will play a little game of russian roulette until you concede... or for the rest of your otherwise short existence."

Would you then start using Galaxy? If not at first, then how many times would you find yourself playing russian roulette with the GOGBear, telling him to shove his Galaxy up the Universe’s read end, before you call it quits?

And, more importantly: is the GOGBear not merciful?????

We all said nothing would convince us, but this is something. And something is definitely not nothing.

P.S.: This post does not take itself seriously, so neither should you. The GOGBear does not actually own a revolver and is an otherwise peaceful creature, though somewhat furry and menacing, as described above.

Just pull out the internet cable, that way GOG bear cannot phone home to ask about operation of the tun and therefore it’s back in your control.

No I will never ever use GOG Galaxy. Ever.

Did you find something about the GOGBear that we don't know? Is he preparing to pull the trigger for us?

I like that the reality of using a client basically becomes an eternal scene from The Deer Hunter, but as if it were co-plotted by David Lynch and had dialogue written by Shane Black.

That said, no. My OS isn't supported, so that's that.

No, I'd spit in the Gogbear's face and tell him it's liberty or death for me. No Galaxy ever. I already have downloaded most of my installers anyway.

Or,:

o.O Okay then. Someone has too much time on their hands.

I am not avoiding Galaxy right now because I hate it and "will never use a client", but because:

1. i don't have to, and I tend not to use something that I don't need and is just an extra step/hurdle to get my game running.

I personally feel a gaming client is useful for two things:
- single-player games that are updated very often (e.g. in-dev games).
- online multiplayer games where you need the multiplayer infrastructure and a system to keep all players at the same patch level (=forced autoupdate). It doesn't hurt if the client also offers anticheat functionality because I hate cheaters in my online games.

Since i am currently not playing either type of games on GOG, I don't need Galaxy = I don't use Galaxy. This could change if I got an urge to buy and play some in-dev game that is getting important fixes every day, or some online multiplayer game. Neither have happened yet. I am occasionally playing only one online game, Team Fortress 2, and for that I am using Steam.

2. The reason I don't currently have Galaxy even installed on my PCs is because I am still under the impression that it can interact with my offline installed GOG games, like that if I just want to start the offline-installed single-player game, it goes on to launch the Galaxy client even if I never asked and meant it to do that.

I don't know what is the current status of that, are the offline-installed and Galaxy-installed GOG games completely separate from each other, not interacting with each other, or not? At least the offline-installed games seem to often include some Galaxy DLLs etc., which leads me to believe they do interact.

Knowing that in advance, I'd call his bluff then whip out my own concealed pistol, switch roles and hold him to hostage on grounds on inconsistency. ie, if he needs a client for games, then why not everything as well. I'd demand he shape his life around needing a Google / Mozilla / Microsoft client to launch a web browser, an office Launcher to open Word, a maths client to open Calculator, a note client to open Notepad, another client for launching game utilities like Borderless Windowed or xpadder, a compression client to open 7zip, etc. I'd require that in order to install Galaxy / Steam, you first need to use a Client Installer Client. Stream games? You need a client for OBS. On his phone, I'd make him use a navigation client to open Google Maps, a video client to open Youtube, another client to start Google Drive, etc. Then I'd put all these behind a meta-client which is required to launch the launchers needed to launch the apps.

Then I'd start on the physical stuff - GOG Bear will no longer allowed to pick up his toothbrush without it being wrapped in some external wrapping from the store he bought it from. Want that pizza? Can't place it in the oven directly, he'll need special cooking "client foil" branded by the store he bought the pizza from. In the end, after placing every item he comes into contact with behind some additional step required by the store who sold it vs the store who made it, he'll cry out in frustration to which I'll reply, "but isn't this exactly what you wanted for me"? Then after seeing the light, I'll untie him, we both part our separate ways and go home to play GOG games - him with his "digital cellophane" addiction, and me by just jumping straight into the game having long thrown the cellophane wrapper in the bin due to lack of need. ;-)

No, not really. I'd call it GOGBear fan fiction and hope we'll never live to see Galaxy forced on us. I was going for a psychological thriller kind of thing here, not a full blown horror story :P. I sometimes write as a hobby, so let's call it "training". This only took me like 10 minutes.

On a side note, for context, I'm also a Linux user so I couldn't really use Galaxy even if I wanted to. Which I don't.

As a wise man once said:
"I rather die on offline backup installers than keep living on the Galaxy client."

I've obviously not tested this, so I could be wrong here, but I expect games installed using offline installers to work with a local Galaxy installation, as long as they provide support for it for either achievements or multiplayer. As you said, the required dlls are there even in the offline installers.

There's always an alternative. If I can't go client-free here, I'll do it some place else. (It's how I came to be here in the first place)