I get an IDP.Generic virus alert with AVG Antivirus every time I try to start Wrath: Aeon of Ruin. And it keeps moving the executable to quarantine every time I reinstall. I bought a bunch of games and it hasn't happened with other GOG games. What is going on?

Most probably false positive. Try uploading game .exe here - https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload
If it's clean, make an exemption for it in your AV.

If AVG has a way to report false positives, do that as well. They'll probably analyze the executable and then update AVG to no longer flag the game executable as a virus.

Do people still trust in AVG Antivirus ?

What's going on is you are using snake oil software to give you the illusion of security.

"Generic" means that it was a heuristic find or in layman's terms AVG didn't find any virus. It found behaviour (like installing something in C:\ with admin rights, creating registry entries etc.) that CAN occasionally be found in viruses as well and went "Alright, that's a virus. Gonna make that sweet, sweet security. Oh yeah!"

That's like saying "Hey, bank robbers use guns and go behind the bank counter!" and then putting the security guard on the FBI most wanted list.

In addition to the post above.

To avoid those false claims because of overly idiotic heuristics, AVs usually keep very large whitelist of allowed or excluded things, to the point that those could become dangerous too.
Just imagine, your behavior and lookalike system to see bad guys is so bad, that you need a whitelist with basically billions of entries that exclude stuff from that list.
Maintaining such a list is not only a pain in the ass, it is impossible to keep in good shape to the point, that AVs even found system files of windows to be bad because heuristic told them so.

And the smaller the software is, the less AV vendors care about.
What they do care about is pretending that their system tells the truth and doesn't make mistakes to the point of nearly being scare ware.

I never heard about the heuristic actually preventing something though...


About AVG.
AVG, Avira, Norton. They are all the same, they are one company, they use one engine.
And they should be avoided at all cost.

You are good enough with the Windows Defender.
If you want a bit more but as few false positives as possible, go for Nod32/Eset.
If you want a very different approach, go for Comodo Internet Security (more for advanced users).

But leave AVG/Avira/Norton behind.

Thanks for discussing this, guys. I went ahead and scanned the file on VirusTotal too. 1 out of 72 security vendors marked it as malicious. Something called Bkav Pro. There are two launchers for the game. wrath-gog.exe, which AVG and Bkav Pro seem to have a problem with. And wrath.exe, which seems fine. I'm sure both are fine but I think I'll just use wrath.exe, so there's no problem at all then.

Bkav Pro is junkware that only exists because they managed to capture an niche market served by nobody else. AVG suffered from seasonal rot.

You don't need either of them, and your system is probably worse with either, especially if either one is open to hallucinations.