So, I've been using GOG Galaxy 2.0 for a month or so now after receiving my invitation, and generally I love it. There are just s few things I'd like to see to make it the perfect unified games library for me:


- The BIG thing I'd like to see is the ability to launch games from other platforms (eg: Steam) without opening that platform's launcher. Contact the DRM APIs directly in Galaxy so we truly only need one library launcher. I see that disabled setting "Launch games with GOG" in the menu, with its tantalizing "coming soon" tooltip, and I assume that's what that's about. Greatly looking forward to it becoming reality.

- The Tag system is good, but could use some tweaking. The ability to rename tags, for example. Also, adding tags to a game through the context menu (right-click on game) is a bit short - it would be good if the panel extended to use the full height of the user's screen.

- I've noticed that filtering by two different tags results in a UNION of the two (shows all games that have either one), but if I'm selecting multiple tags to filter by, I'm generally looking for the INTERSECTION (show only games that have both.) It would be great if we could flip that logic around, or perhaps introduce a toggle to choose between union or intersection of tags when filtering.

- I like how Galaxy 2.0 keeps track of which games are currently installed or not. It would be cool if there were some visual indication of which ones are currently installed (or not installed) on the grid though. This is a relatively minor request - I know I can filter by "installed" or "not installed" and see the list that way - and that works fine. Being able to just see which ones are ready to launch while scrolling through the whole list would be neat, though.

- I saw someone else asking to make launching a game from the grid a one-click affair, whereas right now it's two (right click to open menu, then left-click Play.) I concur with that request. A "play" icon that appears in one corner of a game's panel while hovering over it, for example, when it's installed, or a "download/install" icon on games that aren't installed. This could also dovetail nicely into the previous point.

- Finally, I dislike the limit of 500 custom covers. I don't actually have 500 games in there (yet) but I can foresee a day when I do, and I like to add custom art to everything so I can include visual markers (for example, I like to put a banner on one corner showing the play time as estimated by howlongtobeat.com)

I understand, from reading these forums, that this limit is imposed because these covers are stored on GOG servers. Obviously, you want a finite limit on how much space one user can take up on your servers, that makes perfect sense, but my question is why does this sort of thing NEED to be stored on your servers in the first place? Store custom user content like tags and cover art locally and give us an option to "export" our customizations into some sort of container file format (xml, or whatever.) We can back that file up ourselves and import it back if we need to reinstall Galaxy.

One of the things I love the most about GOG is how you provide offline installers for the games, so we can maintain our own backups and properly own our own data. I'm surprised you aren't following a similar methodology with Galaxy 2.0. Again, keep the online option with its 500 item limit for those who want it, but a local option without such limitations would be greatly welcome.


Thank you for taking the time to listen to my incoherent ramblings :)

I actually imagined that that's how it would work when I got GOGG2.0, but I don't think it's possible to bypass the launcher. That would mean you're essentially bypassing the DRM, which is something I can see Steam and Uplay and others taking issue with. That's why I love GOG, DRM free and I'd buy my whole library on it if I could do it over again.

IF they can get that to work, it would be nothing short of amazing.

Meanwhile, you can just open Notepad, put the commands below in, save the file as Whatever.txt, rename the file extension to Whatever.bat, create a shortcut to that file and voila, you can have all your launchers launching with GOG Galaxy while we wait for the feature itself :)

@ECHO OFF

start "" "<Path to GOG Galaxy launcher shortcut here>"
start "" "<Path to launcher 1 shortcut here>"
start "" "<Path to launcher 2 shortcut here>"
(add more if you need)

exit

For example, I only have Steam right now since I'm not currently playing any Uplay games, so I have

@ECHO OFF

start "" "C:\Games\GOG Galaxy\GalaxyClient.exe"
start "" "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Steam\Steam"

exit

You can already do this by activating "status" in the "customize grid view" settings. You will get a little icon in the lower right corner below the cover for installed games to start them directly.

No, I'm not talking about bypassing DRM. The Steam client has an API it hits to validate the DRM on your games when you launch them, and to keep track of who's using your library for family sharing, etc. That's just a URL that Steam knows and communicates with. I'm talking about Galaxy having the ability to hit that API directly and validate the DRM requirements without opening the Steam client. And likewise for other platforms. Galaxy already somehow maintains our authentication to those platforms for syncing libraries (I haven't had to re-authenticate since installing Galaxy 2.0) so it could use that authentication to hit DRM-related APIs too and get permission to run the game directly.

It may well require cooperation from the other platforms to integrate this, which is fine, I'm not suggesting GOG try to go behind anyone's backs here.


Additionally, there are surprisingly many DRM-free games on Steam and Epic, and probably others, they just aren't advertised as such. For example. most of the Epic freebies I've been grabbing from their weekly give-aways throughout 2019 are DRM free. I need the Epic launcher running to install them, but after that I can shut it down, add the game to Steam as a "non-Steam" game and run it from there. The Epic launcher will auto-boot for the couple of them that actually have DRM, but for most of them it will remain shut down. However, using Galaxy 2.0, it ALWAYS boots the Epic launcher before starting an Epic Store game. Even when I KNOW, from Steam, that it isn't necessary.

Even if they can't work out a deal to validate third party DRM directly, it would be nice if there was some mechanism to launch third-party games from the installed files, so that launchers only boot up when they're actually needed. A simple option to change the launch command manually would suffice (which is a feature Steam already has for non-Steam games, so it's not like this is anything shady.) Yeah, I found that for myself some time after making this post. :)
Good job GOG, knowing what I want before I do.