I was reading a thread and a user posted something interesting that I didn't think of.


"As several people commented here in the past, if GOG went out of business, Galaxy would become abandoned and if a serious security issue was later discovered in non-updated galaxy.dll's that due to no-one being around to fix was serious enough to get blocked on an OS level, that would actually break many hundreds of "Galaxified" GOG games in a way it wouldn't have with pre-2014 installers. Obviously that's not a likely short-term issue, but as a wake up call to those who think it's outlandish, we've already seen it happen with SecuROM, Adobe Flash, etc, dll's get hard-blocked by W10. Fixing it would literally involve swapping out the galaxy.dll with a fake one exactly as pirates do to remove Steam's DRM. And the bottom line is, dealing with that 'exactly like DRM' crap isn't why people want actual DRM-Free installers regardless of what you want to personally call it."

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_should_disclose_whether_they_have_drm_or_not/post51


What are your thoughts on this? I am not experienced when it comes to dll files,etc so I don't know how true this statement is but thought I would let others know.

In my experience it doesn't matter if galaxy.dll (or other galaxy-related files for that matter) is present or not. I honestly cannot recall a single game refusing to run or start at all if any trace of Galaxy had been removed from the corresponding installation directory beforehand. That is for the singleplayer portion of those games, of course.

There are exceptions, like the recently released Saints Row remaster which If I remember correctly for some reason wouldn't save your configuration/settings(?) with galaxy.dll absent from the installation directory. Not sure if this has been resolved in the meantime.

In short - as a non-Galaxy user who plays singleplayer exclusively I don't see any potential issue rearing its ugly head in the future, at all.

I've seen various GOG posters make complaints about this, but as far as I can tell, those comments seem to be baseless fear-mongering propaganda which is borne out of their vehement hatred for the fact that some GOG games offer Galaxy Achievements, which is something that they don't want GOG customers to be allowed to have.

That's also the exact same reason why all pro-Achievements posts on this board, and/or posts that ask for equal treatment & feature parity for GOG customers on that subject, always get "low rated" (including this one you are now reading, most likely).

Perhaps people wouldn't be "anti-achievement" if it wasn't for the fact that for you to have this completely worthless feature we had to get a client, and ever since we got the client everything went from old, cool, DRM-free GOG to new, "we want to be Steam" DRM-ish GOG. We are all paying a pretty hefty price so that you can get a pat on the back from a game for taking fifty steps to the left or opening a drawer six times.

GOG is impure with Galaxy?

Well. Do not use Galaxy, or do not use GOG. But you are here. Strange perversion.

I've no idea what you mean. I don't use Galaxy. I'm here. I've no idea what is "perverted" about it. Strange post.

While I'm sure it may not be the case for every game, I have yet to personally run into a game that will not function if you elite the galaxy dlls.

You are complaining about the fact that we need a client in GOG because of worthless features like achievement or another shit.

Well. I am just saying that if you do not use Galaxy you won't have worthless features at all.

Complaining for the sake of complain.

Oh, come on.

"Perhaps people wouldn't be "anti-achievement" if it wasn't for the fact that for you to have this completely worthless feature we had to get a client"

Completely missed the point, or chose not to see it. Quote the whole statement. The problem isn't the client directly, but that a bastion of consumer friendliness has dropped almost everything that most of us loved to chase a dollar. And they continue to try and push boundaries of what the customer base will accept in order to keep chasing it. I'm cool with being profitable. I'm not cool with selling out to get there.

Trying to convert this in an academical text analysis is lame because the whole quote means the same for what I was pointing. If you do not want achievements do not use Galaxy.

The rest are legit, subjective and cliche opinions about how bad and greedy videogames stores are.

It's likely only there so that you don't have to screw around too much if you decide to start using Galaxy after previously only using the offline installers. It'd make sense, honestly: include the galaxy DLL with all offline installers so that you can quickly get up and running if you decide to start using Galaxy.

I consider it as a minor issue.

Sure it is a potential risk that might make older GOG games not work on Windows 16 or Windows 20 because Microsoft deliberately would block such old DLL, but then at that point there are probably lots of other changes in Windows that have made such games non-working.

If Microsoft deliberately blocked galaxy.dll, then I'd probably try to run that game in Linux (WINE) instead. Microsoft can't decide what Linux accepts, thankfully. :)

Exactly this.

Among many other reasons why achievements are a bad idea, they are based on Steam documentation an additional form of DRM, which is meant to devalue pirated game versions (as in copies with no connection to the server). It shouldn't come as a big surprise that many GOG customers don't appreciate that.

Anyway, back to the topic, I don't think those Galaxy features actually do much on offline installers. It is somewhat disturbing though that there are useless files in the installers. For whatever reason GOG has deleted original game exe's from some games which use ScummVM, making it impossible for the users to play with some other third party software, but somehow having Galaxy files in a non-Galaxy installer isn't an issue.

I don't think there's any such risk that the OP is describing (as of yet, anyway), but we can ask the question, why are those files in those installers if they are not needed?