Well, also games installed through offline installers are supposed to transmit achievments, right? (well, I don't really care, but some people do)

Without a proper dll that's not possible. This is the way for the game to communicate with your account.

So the existance of this dll does not say anything about how much the game depends on Galaxy.

If there is a live connection needed to transmit achievements (in other words: Galaxy must be running) or if the achievements are stored locally and transmitted once a connection is established, doesn't matter.
A way to initiate that process is needed and that's the dll.

Would there be less concerns if the dll was called "gogachievements.dll"?

The situation with galaxy.dll is different - SecuROM used a device driver (.sys file) so ran with elevated privileges while Adobe Flash was disabled by Adobe themselves (via a killswitch), though Microsoft did block the plugin in their browsers. Galaxy.dll only affects the application/game it is loaded with, and would only have the privileges available to that application. So if there was a major security issue, it would be up to GOG to release updates installers - and post-GOG it would be up to users to choose to run an exploitable game or not. In practice, every application is exploitable - a secure setup tries to limit this by having network access and privileged actions (driver installs/direct memory access, hook installation, process modification, critical registry changes) controlled by third party security software. There's a long running thread highlighting the problems caused by galaxy.dll on older operating systems - and if you'd tested by removing the galaxy.dll file yourself, you'd have found your game crashing on startup. To emphasise - this is the galaxy.dll file included in the game folder, not the GOG Galaxy client.
Games installed via the offline installer don't transmit achievements if GOG Galaxy is not installed.
Galaxy.dll itself has no network functionality (see attached screenshot showing exported functions) - instead it provides links to GOG Galaxy, if it is installed. So yes, it is necessary for that function, but not sufficient.

I never said they do. Galaxy is needed for that, I know.
But assuming that Galaxy IS installed you want them to do it, no matter if you installed the game through galaxy or through the offline installer, right?

I didn't expect the dll to have full network functionality, it would be quite some overkill to integrate that in every game. Then every game would need a authentification process to be able to log you in to your account and we don't want that, do we?
But it DOES connect you to a portal that does have those abilities.


So is the dll bad? No, not at all, it's needed for a certain functionality.

How many games did you guys test? I picked around 30 and found approx 1/3 had the issue. Examples:-
- Crookz The Big Heist
- Divinity Original Sin
- Kathy Rain
- Neverwinter Nights EE
- Stardew Valley crashed without error message though the SMAPI console stated "Could not load file GalaxyCSharp"
- This War of Mine

I hit the attachment limit of pics to post, but Pathologic HD and Prey were others, Neighbours Back From Hell just crashed without error message, Shadow Tactics Blades just froze on the Made With Unity load screen, etc. I only tested a tiny fraction of what I own, so extrapolate from that.

Let's clear something up - I'm not saying there will be an issue. I hope there won't. The intent for posting is simply to highlight one potential "point of failure" that's been introduced in post 2014 installers to be aware of for the future if some games suddenly stopped working but not others in potential "post GOG" years to come. It's not simply a case of "what if it gets blocked for security reason = unlikely so fear-mongering", but rather a comment on stuff we've seen with Fallout New Vegas where the game worked perfectly on XP but suddenly didn't after galaxy.dll's were integrated (due to the galaxy.dll's needing a higher OS version that the game itself), whilst FO3 (with no Galaxy integration) still does work on XP. A lot of people don't seem to like W11 and if the galaxy.dll's were updated to need that, then galaxy integrated games could well break in future updates for those remaining on W7-10 in the same way. Likewise it could screw up the ability to build "retro rigs" in future in a way that pre-Galaxified installers never had any equivalent issue with.

^ Yeah that's a good point. GOG may proudly boast "we're about old games on the NEWEST Windows not old OS's" but ignoring the unholy mess that W11 looks like (RIP usable taskbar + context menu's in Explorer + potential TPM lockouts for older hardware), this crap's gonna end up looking absurd if in 10 years time Microsoft may have succeeded turning that newest version of Windows into full on Software As A Service / subscription based / cloud Windows that they've been fantasising about for a while (see how "full" Office was deliberately watered down to push O365 subscriptions), and updated Galaxy.dll's in older games break the ability to fall-back to older versions of Windows to be "permitted" to play those games offline...

Question Of The Day : Is there any real point to DRM-Free games on a hyper-DRM'd always online OS? Be careful how much OS compatibility you break in the name of forced Galaxification of offline installers, GOG. If I wanted a Steam like experience, then I'd just use Steam...

Or more likely people are intelligent enough to see a no-compromise offline installer and shoving a wall of online feature related code in games that's tied to store's backend servers that won't be around forever are naturally contradictory. I don't begrudge anyone using Galaxy for wanting Achievements. Just keep that stuff in Galaxy without forcing OFFLINE installers to have client related code they can't even use at the expense of breaking OS compatibility. But that hasn't happened so the "baseless fear-mongering propaganda" that's basically normal people expressing valid concern over the long-term trend of degrading the quality of offline installers with "Galaxy feature creep" is actually observable reality.

Just reading from above. There are games which absolutely require galaxy.dll to be present, even if it is null, just like steam.dll.
Yes, eventually it will break, just like any of these additional barriers, there are plenty of examples of this where parts which are added fail later on, starforce being removed from support by windows, GFWDEAD.
Regardless of wether you want galaxy features or not it should be a choice. For galaxy users they can download the galaxy version, for those who do not want it then there should be no part of it, nor should the installers be setup the same way as far galaxy. Unfortunately gogs standpoint is to push galaxy above all else, and I mean above all else.

I will point out that gog, who don’t have resource to fix things, answer questions, answer support etc. managed to find a huge amount of resource to go into every single offline installer, recompile each one as galaxy streams within the installer, and add in galaxy features (various dependent on game). So unless it’s 100% towards galaxy, there is “no resources”.

Statement of fact: Yes, it's potentially a problem in the future. This was not a potential problem before the client.

Statement of opinion: This was triggered by the mob pushing for a client back in the day (it's interesting to see how people are slowly realising over time that the client was a terrible idea). Leaving aside that argument (and the side-track about achievements - apart from to say that I really don't get the point of them), at some point, GalaxyXX.dll will break and GoG won't be around to fix it.

In the future, there may be a group of people who then decide to crack the GoG games so that you can continue to play them. However, by doing this, and while I wouldn't see it as being morally wrong, you would be in a legally grey area (especially if the game was still on sale in a DRM'd store front)

No, Honestly I think it's incredibly unlikely to cause any real issue in the future and if any it will be a minor one.

As others have mentioned Securom and Flash were very specific cases and Microsoft didn't even really block "Securom", only the driver part of it, you can have game loading code from Securom, Starforce and Safedisk, etc... that works perfectly on Windows 10. You also have thousands or outdated DLL full of potential security flaw that runs perfectly well on Windows 10 and 11.


Then there is the compatibility issue :

It might cause "backward" compatibility as in if the DLL is build using a runtime that is only available on Windows 10 then the game might not start on Windows 7 even if it was originally released on it.

But the issue exists because Gog, and even worse with Steam, don't care at all that games they sell are backward compatible with old OSes but only care to make them run on newer ones. We have tons of game that would no longer run on their original OSes even without taking Galaxy into account, simply because they uses DLL, wrappers, tools, fixes to makes them runs on modern OS that are no longer compatible with their original one.

Now the question is would no longer supported games have issue running on future OS because of Galaxy?

Again I think the answer is "extremely unlikely", it's not like Galaxy.dll or the Steam ones are using exotic languages or runtime, they are using the Visual C++ ones from Microsoft like hundreds thousands of other Win32 application, so as long as Microsoft cares about making their OSes somewhat backward compatible it will continue to run, and if no longer does then most likely the game itself won't run either and would need to be patched / fixed again.

I was told that you can set the taskbar and startmenu to work like the one in Windows 10. The configuration is a lot better too.
But the context menu sucks - plain and simple. I am sure we will see some changes (or mods) regarding that.
For most games that don't need authentification the DLL is a one way ticket, it's not there to grant anything, it only tells the server (through galaxy) to do something. The games don't even know if the server answers. Many one-time achievements got lost because Galaxy wasn't running.

I don't know what the future holds but I inherently trust the old GOG installers more than the Galaxified ones. Just wish I had joined up sooner so that maybe I could have had more of them instead of all the Galaxified ones. Similarly I trust DRM-free offline installers that are sold elsewhere as they don't have the client bloat. The less "tripwires" as it were, the better. I agree with those saying we should be able to have an offline installer like the ones of old, and Galaxy users can have their version too.

The problem is that GOG seems to push Galaxy above all else, "full Steam ahead!", so this will never happen. I'm honestly surprised we even still have the option to download the offline "backup" installers that they hide under the stairwell like Harry Potter or something. I know staff have assured offline installers will say but actions speak louder than words and it is clear the offline installers are not a priority for GOG; however, they remain THE reason to shop here for me, even despite the Galaxification which causes some amount of worry.

Well yeah but I think it's easier to focus on the galaxy.dll since if it deemed "unallowed" by Windows it would be analogous to other past things that Windows blocks. The sticking point is that it is ultimately "bad design" as I figure that if we could just have fully "Un-Galaxied" installers/games, this particular risk wouldn't exist.

Well this "bad design" is how 99% of DLL are used in Windows, i.e. statically linked (yes I know it's lib that are statically linked not DLL but let's keep thing simple). And the chances of Windows blocking Galaxy DLL are as high as them deciding to block the game EXE.

I think its a non-issue, because if GOG went out of business, 10-20 years from now, a compatibility layer for old versions of Windows like Wine might become your best bet to run those aging installers which I assume would not implement stringent security measures that block certain dlls.

Honestly, the moment that GOG is no longer slaving away trying to keep their installers (those that the game devs are not maintaining themselves anyways) up to date with recent versions of Windows will be the moment I start looking at my options to fixate a working setup.

At this point, anything they stuff into Galaxy makes me uneasy, because it make break the offline installers (they don't seem to validate those as well as the Galaxy ones) or otherwise justify putting more of the game's content "online only".

At the very least, achievements force them to put in some security which by definition restricts usage in certain ways (and that is likely to leak into the offline installers in order to keep the code delta low for the offline version). If the achievements weren't there, that security would not be required.