And/or start refunding.

It's called PlayFab, and it's a nasty piece of spyware.
To promote it, users are also being tricked into joining the "Society of Raiders", in a way that forces them to give up their cell phone info.
..and if that wasn't bad enough in itself, this malware has caused a lot of problems for the Steam versions, like hangs, freezes, broken saves, and completely preventing the games from even launching!
As a workaround, all of the reported issues are apparently fixes by manually removing the PlayFab files from the game directories.
However, this is definitely not something that we want to have in the GOG versions, so I'm glad that the patches have been delayed, if it means that we evenually can have them without PlayFab!

What do you mean, "delayed"?! Is there an official announcement of some kind, or just an assumption of yours?

It's what I hope for, and a logical assumption, concidering the nature of these updates.
I guess your assumption is that there won't be any more updates for the GOG versions?

Not sure, because of the serious lack of communication! They did officially announce some delays of updates or releases in the past, but not in this case. Just dead silence.
IMO, therefore the procuct is now faulty and can be refunded regardless of purchase date.

Yeah, lack of communication is never a good thing.
Aspyr are notorious for it, but I agree that if there indeed is a conflict going on behind the scenes, it would be nice if GOG gave us a simple heads up!

The latest patch is coming to GOG though because Aspyr confirmed it on their X / Twitter page. But it has been like 3 weeks and no update yet so who knows what is going on. Wishful thinking, but what if they are trying to fix the overlay issues in the GOG version? Either way, I hope they do release it and don´t forget about it...

Let me guess: That was before that playfab "Golden Gun" disaster became known.

good to know. thank u guys.

I contacted GOG a couple of days ago and luckily I got an answer. Apparently, the patch they got from the developers wasn't working as intended, and now they are waiting for the fixed patch.

Aspyr's refusal to communicate with their customers is self-sabotage at this point.

Proof attached.

Looks like we were all wrong, then. Apologies.

Wonder though if GOG is in need of a dedicated build because of the whole playfab runtime shenanigans.I can't imagine merely stripping out DRM could take so long. Good for GOG to uphold its standards, bad for Aspyr for being Aspyr as usual

Thanks for the info, btw

Doesn't sound so good to me.
If it was only a question of removing PlayFab from the patches, Aspyr would have had new ones ready within 10 minutes.
This might indicate that they're rather working on ironing out all the issues, and releasing new builds with PlayFab still included.
I just hope that it doesn't become more integrated, to a point where it can't be removed anymore.

well Embracer owns, crystal dynamics, saber interactive and aspyr.

Embracer Group is a publicly traded company; meaning its ownership is dispersed among many shareholders, including investors like BlackRock Inc. (Tik Tok), co-founders of fan companies like (“Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends: not the Tolkien estate), The company operates as a holding company for numerous video game and media studios, and the ownership structure is evolving as it transforms into three independent, publicly listed entities."

To be fair, Core Design had been burned out from crunching deadlines too.

I can wait.

If you try out Nexusmods, there are all sorts of mods you can choose to use or heck even create. still learning myself!

Ancora niente!! mamma mia che schifo! a momenti ha un mese che è uscita la patch!

To be honest, this whole patch situation is becoming pathetic. I also contacted GoG and Aspyr and both replied with something along the lines of: "We know, and we're working on it.".

I mean, it's been a month. The patch can't be THAT broken, because it's basically the same build as the Steam version, just with a different version of the retailer-specifc dlls and it's working fine on Steam.

My guess still is that the Golden Guns unlock mechanism is against GoGs policies and Aspyr/Crystal don't care enough to react swiftly because they simply want to push that to the customers.
Maybe they also decided to skip this patch for GoG completely, because they have to release a new one soon removing the AI generated voice lines again.

At any rate, I'm once again very saddened by how this franchise is treated. It's a mess and it really frustrates me.