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General discussionGOG GALAXY BETA(6179 posts) (6179 posts) 
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This is my favourite topic
Posted May 06, 2015
high rated
!!! PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING !!!

== BUG REPORTING ==

Please use: http://mantis.gog.com and include
1. steps to reproduce the bug (if possible)
2. screenshot or movie showing the bug (if possible)
3. Galaxy Client logs (see below)

Where can I find Galaxy logs on my computer?
On Windows 7 or later: C:\ProgramData\GOG.com\Galaxy\Logs
On Mac OS X: /Users/Shared/GOG.com/Galaxy/Logs

== FEATURE SUGGESTIONS ==

Please use: http://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy. For feature suggestions and votes on them please try do explain how Galaxy and its users will really benefit from it.

== IMPORT ALREADY INSTALLED GAMES TO GALAXY ==

1. For GOG games installed using installers from the last few months (so called Galaxy-compatible installers)
Click the Galaxy logo button on top of the sidebar and select "scan and import folders" - it will find all compatible games within that folder and add them to the Client.

2. For remaining GOG game INSTALLATIONS
Find the game in the Library (click on the image of the game), then click the More button and select "Manage Installation" -> "Import folder" and point the folder selector into the folder where that game is installed.

== KNOWN ISSUES ==
- throttling max download speed is not yet possible
- notifications related to incoming chat messages and friend requests does not always disappear instantly when consumed and may require reloading Store page
- games imported from existing installations will auto-update once, even if updating is disabled
- Moving Galaxy from /Applications on Mac OS X will stop the app from working
- Galaxy cannot be launched by other users on the same computer
Post edited October 03, 2016 by Liosan
Posted July 03, 2015
high rated
Hi Everyone,

Below you can find the changelog of GOG Galaxy.

Changelog 1.1.15 (September 7th, 2016):
Changes / Improvements:
• Added Wallet button in dropdown menu under user's avatar
• Performance improvements on UI speed and a little on CPU usage
• Enabled copying text in Galaxy forums
• History will now remember only the 100 most recent pages in history
Bugfixes:
• Fix for "Disk access problem" bug, which broke installation and updates of games. (Bug happened on Windows only, but general mechanism is better on OS X as well)
• Fix for Verify/Repair, which did not work in some scenarios (The above bug for example)
• Fix for "Server problem" while downloading backup installers or other goodies. They will now work, even if temporary download folder is same as destination folder
• Fixed situations in which Store page sometimes did not load properly after waking up computer

Changelog 1.1.16 (September 19th, 2016):
Improvements:
• Galaxy now supports H.264 codecs
• Much better handling of paying using third party processors (PayPal, paysafecard etc.)
• Friends and chat window now scale with the system scaling factor
• New and prettier GOG Eula will be used in games
• Better handling of loading timeouts

Bugfixes:
• "INSTALLED" label will appear all pages of the library now
• Fixed a bug with game time tracking for some games. Galaxy will now register more than one minute:)
• Fixed a bug in which Galaxy in rare cases could not be able to update the game (bug rather existed in rollbacks)
• Galaxy will no longer show a little bit of bare code upon launching
• Fixed blurred images in sidebar expanded list mode

Changelog 1.1.17(hotfix September 20th, 2016):
• Fixed crashes and 'Disk Access Problem' caused by updating Galaxy from 1.1.12 (and earlier versions) to 1.1.16

Changelog 1.1.18 (October 19th, 2016):
Improvements:
• More accurate game time tracking mechanism
• Improved mechanism showing current online status between friends

Bugfixes:
• Fixed a bug which caused Galaxy to stop tracking game time

Changelog 1.1.19 (October 25th, 2016):
Improvements:
• We have removed download size from Galaxy updater. It showed faulty data, as Galaxy Updater doesn't download > 100mb each time and only downloads differences. It will come back in nearest future, when it will show correct data:)
• The first check for game updates will be done 15s after Galaxy starts, instead of 5 minutes.
• OSX: Improved mechanism responsible for removing old files left by Galaxy updates
• OSX: Improved the way Galaxy handles installing games into protected locations like /Applications; you will receive a password prompt about a "Helper tool" installation

Bugfixes:
• Fixed "Essential components missing" error which sometimes appeared after fresh installation
• Fixed a situation where failure in Updater could lead to Galaxy not being able to launch
• Fixed self-update on OSX to properly delete leftover files
• Fixed friends window losing functionality after network loss and reconnect
• Fixed blurry Windows 10 Galaxy tray icon
• Galaxy will remember maximised window status

Changelog 1.1.20(November 2nd, 2016)
Bugfixes:
• Fixed installing XNA4 and other msi-based dependencies.
• Store page won't be reloaded twice upon logging in

Changelog: 1.1.21 (November 17th, 2016)
Improvements / changes:
• Added "with preview updates" suffix to Galaxy window title
• Small optimizations with memory and Galaxy loading time
• Small improvements with updater, it should fail less

Bugfixes:
• Fixed a bug with Galaxy refreshing pages
• Fixed occasional crashes

Changelog 1.1.22 (November 22nd, 2016)
Bugfixes:
• Galaxy will no longer freeze when downloading a game update and checking another game in library
• Galaxy should crash even less now:)

Changelog 1.1.23 (November 28th, 2016)
Bugfixes:
• Galaxy will be now able to reconnect to internet correctly, if computer was put to sleep and then woken up without (initially) Internet connection
• Downloading of games/updates should have less impact on starting other installations

Changelog 1.1.24(December 6th, 2016)
Bugfixes:
• Downloading an installer with Galaxy and using it to install the game should not result in redownloading the whole game again
• Updater should no longer report over 100% progress on download

Adjustments:
• Increased timeout for failures during sign in
• Increased timeout for "Loading Timeout"

Changelog 1.1.25 (December 20th, 2016)
Bugfixes:
• Fixed a crash when trying to install certain games (Game affected was 1979 Revolution: Black Friday).

Changelog 1.1.26 (December 23rd, 2016, Preview only)
Changes:
• Introduced new downloading mechanism

Changelog 1.1.27 (January 26th, 2017, Preview)
Bugfixes:
• Aborting or pausing downloads will be smoother (They will stop faster)
• Pausing downloads will no longer cause memory usage to go super high

Changelog 1.1.27 (January 31th, 2017)
Changes:
• Introduced new downloading mechanism
Bugfixes:
• Aborting or pausing downloads will be smoother (They will stop faster)
• Pausing downloads will no longer cause memory usage to go super high

Changelog 1.1.28 (March 10th, 2017)
Changes / Improvements:
- Better support for differential patches. They are now seperate depending on game's language and system bitness
- Italian & Japanese partial support + more Spanish translations
- Improved checking for new available updates of the games
- We'll sort available DLCs alphabetically
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a crash when Galaxy doesn't have permissions to the logs directory
- Fixed showing empty grey page after a while of inactivity
- Fixed infinite spinner after going to support page
- Fixed displaying of prices in cart when they were over 999 (Bug caused by a comma in the price)
- MacOS: Popup windows (for example chat) will no longer open as a tab but as a separate window instead
- MacOS: Fixed memory leak (~30MB upon GOG Galaxy launch)
- MacOS: Fixed memory leak while playing a game

Changelog 1.1.29 (March 14nd, 2017)
Changes:
- Changes in downloading mechanism, which allows for better control over download's flow
Bugfixes:
- Fixed displaying progress of differential patches (It did not display the "Extracting" status)

Changelog 1.1.30 (March 16th, 2017)
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a crash within games downloading mechanism

== PREVIEW UPDATES* ===

HOW TO ENABLE PREVIEWS?
Go to your Galaxy settings and check the option to receive preview updates.

HOW TO DISABLE PREVIEW?
- Uninstall Galaxy
- Download current installer from gog.com/galaxy
- Install Galaxy
- Import your games

Changelog 1.2.0 (March 22nd, 2017)
Changes and improvements:
- Cloud saves backup and syncing (supported games only)
- Screenshot capture with F12 (supported games only)
- In-game overlay with FPS counter and notifications (supported games only)
- Greatly improved chat, also in overlay
- Ability to enable or disable achievements, game time tracking, auto-updating games and more
- Desktop and in-game notifications system
- Ability to set bandwidth limit and scheduler
- New settings window
- Rarity information in achievements
- Abort button next to installation status
- Only one Galaxy Updater window will be shown in most cases
- GOG Galaxy updates will be downloaded in the background
- Games are now downloaded directly to their install directory, instead of a temporary location
- Galaxy changelog is displayed in Galaxy

Bugfixes:
- Fixed game time tracking issues
- Initial size of Galaxy Client window will respect Windows scaling
- Improved Windows 10 Galaxy tray icon
- Fixed a bug which caused Galaxy to redownload whole data in case of a failure of installation/update
- Thumbnail highlighting in media gallery now works properly
- Decreased client's network and CPU usage (especially for a lot of games)
- MacOS: Fixed situation when Galaxy Client could downloading due to App Nap
- MacOS: Fixed crash when logging out with "New post" popup open
- MacOS: Fixed game processes not being properly cleaned up after exiting
Post edited March 22, 2017 by TheTomasz
Posted March 26, 2016
high rated
For everyone who has a problem with missing api-ms-crt dlls in Client's versions post 1.1.5:
Please install one of those windows update: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2999226 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3118401
You may need to update Windows to meet the requirements for these:
For Windows 8.1 and for Windows Server 2012: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2919355
For Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/976932

You can also try reinstalling Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables 2015 (x86) if you meet above requirements.
Available here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145

If above instructions doesn't work for you, create a separate issue on mantis.gog.com and we'll try to help you individually.

Please note that this solution only helps with the missing api-ms-crt dlls.


========================================================================================


Answering this question: Why 1.1 doesn't work after updating to 1.2?

This is happening probably due to incompatible database from version 1.2, please delete this folder:
%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\GOG.com\Galaxy\storage
usually
C:\ProgramData\GOG.com\storage\

Then you'll have to use scan&import (menu under the top Galaxy logo) function to see your games back in Galaxy Client.
Attachments:
programsandfeatu.png (143 Kb)
Post edited March 27, 2017 by TheTomasz
Posted February 18, 2017
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amurgaming: Is this the silence before 1.2?
Well, it certainly wasn’t last time. :P
Posted February 18, 2017
I really hope something finally happens in regard to Galaxy. It's been... half a year? Without any major features appearing. Heck, this is beta, it should get updates frequently, yet I've noticed that Steam has more updates than this.

I am a GOG fanboy, but seriously, it's difficult to find valid excuses for nothing except little bugfixes happening at all.
Post edited February 18, 2017 by Taro94
Posted February 19, 2017
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jimnms: I haven't played a GOG game with achievements in a week until yesterday. There was both a Galaxy update and an update to the game I'm playing (Tyranny) since then. I don't know if the Galaxy update or the game is at fault, but I'm not getting notifications when I unlock an achievement. I noticed last night when I quit the game that I had unlocked 3 achievements. I was getting tired toward the end of my game session, so I thought I just missed it. I was playing about an hour ago, quit to eat, and came back to continue when I noticed that there was a new achievement that I unlocked right before quitting. I definitely would have seen that.

I don't know if I should file a bug report for Galaxy because like I said, there was both a Galaxy update and an update to the game I'm playing since I last played, so I don't know which one is at fault.
Achievements are pretty much broken in all games ever since they've been available to some degree or another, however not every single user will necessarily experience this as everyone's computer systems and Internet connectivity are different and the problems often appear to be related to Internet connectivity and synchronization which will naturally vary from user to user. GOG continues to find and fix bugs with this over time, so you should consider contacting support to see if the problem you're having is a known issue, or follow the instructions in the first post for filing a bug report in their Mantis bug tracker. That may help accelerate another bug getting fixed.

HTH
Posted February 19, 2017
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Taro94: I really hope something finally happens in regard to Galaxy. It's been... half a year? Without any major features appearing. Heck, this is beta, it should get updates frequently, yet I've noticed that Steam has more updates than this.

I am a GOG fanboy, but seriously, it's difficult to find valid excuses for nothing except little bugfixes happening at all.
The 1.1.x series is in maintenance mode currently it seems, only getting bug fixes while the 1.2.x (presumably based on past comments from GOG) is where all the major feature development is occurring. It is presumed that the features they are developing at the moment are not the type of thing that gets developed into a usable state in a few days/weeks/months and dropped out to the public ongoing as it continues to be developed, but rather are things that are a much larger project in nature like the overlay functionality was. If they're working on the most highly requested features such as cloud storage (currently the #1 most requested wishlist item), that's going to take significant development effort both on the client and the back end and is not likely something to shoehorn in in a weekly update manner.

Keep in mind that they originally released the client in a manner like you're suggesting and it was quite an unstable and unreliable state of affairs for quite some time including catastrophic customer data loss (game installation directories getting completely blown away or even someone's entire disk according to public reports). There was a cry to them to not release features before they were at least fleshed out and near completion with a relative degree of stability rather than pushing things out in a half baked buggy state that could kill data. They listened and the client is much more stable and reliable now overall.

From a development engineering standpoint it makes total and complete sense for a project of this magnitude to have a stable branch which only receives security fixes and major bug updates, and a developmental branch where things can be much more broken until they're whipped into shape and at some point in time branched off the development trunk for stabilization pending the alpha/beta/rc/release track.

They seem to be doing this in an organized fashion now for some time rather than the more ad hoc approach they started with up until shortly after the release of Witcher 3.

Unlike Steam which is established now for almost a decade and a half and employs a lot more developers, they have a small team of somewhere between 10-20 active developers working on this as best I've been able to determine via various sources (I have a list of names I keep on hand here). With the resources that they actually have, they seem to be progressing on their client at a rate much faster than Valve did when they started their own client years ago from scratch. Major new features in the Steam client do not show up weekly either, they take many months and years to develop, and it takes a long time for them to roll out from their internal builds to their public beta builds and eventually to their stable build. Comparing the current state of Galaxy client and the speed at which they're able to add new features and stabilize them with the Steam client isn't really taking into account the 12+ year head start Valve has had in developing and streamlining a gaming client nor the vast amount of money and human resources they have put into their client compared to GOG which is a much smaller company.

It is true that we all would like to have a LOT more features in the Galaxy client and have it sooner than later and that we're all impatient for it to happen yesterday, but the truth is that given the various facts behind the scenes - they're doing quite good overall with the resources they have. The problem is more that we often see GOG as a much larger company than they really are in terms of both money and manpower compared to all of the major platforms like Steam/Origin//Uplay etc. that they're often compared to.

Our razzing them on things over time probably helps them to determine where to allocate some resources, but things just don't happen over night. It can totally be frustrating at times and I'm just as frustrated sometimes as anyone. :) But, we need to be patient. It's better that they take more time to do it right than to rush out broken crap that blows away your hard disk weekly and crashes every 10 minutes. :) Drink no wine before its time as they say. :)

That said, I'm foaming at the mouth with anticipation for 1.2.x or whatever the next major release is. I suspect it will happen sometime this year, but probably not for a while and even then it will go through private beta to work the nastiest of bugs out I presume, then make it to the preview channel or some other channel for a while before eventually being pushed to the main beta channel (or perhaps even coming out of beta which would be nice).

Hopefully our rants and raves get them hiring more people in droves though. There are perpetual career openings there that either never get filled, or get filled and remain open for more hires. I hope they can ramp up their manpower this year. Even then however there's Brook's Law to contend with. :)
Posted February 19, 2017
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skeletonbow: Keep in mind that they originally released the client in a manner like you're suggesting and it was quite an unstable and unreliable state of affairs for quite some time including catastrophic customer data loss (game installation directories getting completely blown away or even someone's entire disk according to public reports). There was a cry to them to not release features before they were at least fleshed out and near completion with a relative degree of stability rather than pushing things out in a half baked buggy state that could kill data. They listened and the client is much more stable and reliable now overall.
Oh. So, is that the reason why many people say that Galaxy is a broken mess? Of course, I don’t know how it was a few years ago, but the current version is perfectly stable (for me, anyway). It’s not quite fair to judge a product in its early age after so long.

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skeletonbow: That said, I'm foaming at the mouth with anticipation for 1.2.x or whatever the next major release is. I suspect it will happen sometime this year, but probably not for a while and even then it will go through private beta to work the nastiest of bugs out I presume, then make it to the preview channel or some other channel for a while before eventually being pushed to the main beta channel (or perhaps even coming out of beta which would be nice).
If they did come out of beta, wouldn’t they reset the version number to 1.0 (or maybe 2.0 to avoid any confusion and overlapping)?
Posted February 19, 2017
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skeletonbow: Keep in mind that they originally released the client in a manner like you're suggesting and it was quite an unstable and unreliable state of affairs for quite some time including catastrophic customer data loss (game installation directories getting completely blown away or even someone's entire disk according to public reports). There was a cry to them to not release features before they were at least fleshed out and near completion with a relative degree of stability rather than pushing things out in a half baked buggy state that could kill data. They listened and the client is much more stable and reliable now overall.
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Tyrrhia: Oh. So, is that the reason why many people say that Galaxy is a broken mess? Of course, I don’t know how it was a few years ago, but the current version is perfectly stable (for me, anyway). It’s not quite fair to judge a product in its early age after so long.
Can't answer your first question as I don't have any statistical data etc. to validate the premise, and "many" could be 100 people with 10000000 users for all I know, but Galaxy is rather stable for me nowadays as well, however I haven't been playing GOG games lately.

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skeletonbow: That said, I'm foaming at the mouth with anticipation for 1.2.x or whatever the next major release is. I suspect it will happen sometime this year, but probably not for a while and even then it will go through private beta to work the nastiest of bugs out I presume, then make it to the preview channel or some other channel for a while before eventually being pushed to the main beta channel (or perhaps even coming out of beta which would be nice).
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Tyrrhia: If they did come out of beta, wouldn’t they reset the version number to 1.0 (or maybe 2.0 to avoid any confusion and overlapping)?
Very highly unlikely as that is not something normally done in software engineering release versioning and would cause more confusion and headaches than anything. If they were to do that they might as well call the next version version 5.4, then the version after that 3.7, the next one 9.344 etc. maybe even using negative numbers or complex numbers just to mix things up a bit. :)

They've never publicly stated what if any relevance their version major:minor:patch levels mean or even if that's how they break down the numbering so not many conclusions can be drawn from the way they version. They have stated previously 1.2 was next but that could just be their internal working numbering subject to change in the next major public release. If/when they lose the perpetual beta tag, they'll probably either release a new minor ver bump or perhaps 2.x, it's anyone's guess though. Doesn't really matter, version numbers are fairly meaningless other than to distinguish something newer from older during software upgrades etc.
Posted February 19, 2017
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Tyrrhia: Oh. So, is that the reason why many people say that Galaxy is a broken mess? Of course, I don’t know how it was a few years ago, but the current version is perfectly stable (for me, anyway). It’s not quite fair to judge a product in its early age after so long.
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skeletonbow: Can't answer your first question as I don't have any statistical data etc. to validate the premise, and "many" could be 100 people with 10000000 users for all I know, but Galaxy is rather stable for me nowadays as well, however I haven't been playing GOG games lately.
Well, I said “many” but, really, it’s not really that many (who said word repetition was bad? :P ). It’s just that I see more people criticising Galaxy for its “unstable state” than people defending it on the GOG forums.

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Tyrrhia: If they did come out of beta, wouldn’t they reset the version number to 1.0 (or maybe 2.0 to avoid any confusion and overlapping)?
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skeletonbow: ~infosnip~
Hmm, yeah, resetting would be a bad idea (though it would be kind of fine if this version had a ‘b’ or “beta” appended to it). Thanks for the insight!
Posted February 19, 2017
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skeletonbow: Can't answer your first question as I don't have any statistical data etc. to validate the premise, and "many" could be 100 people with 10000000 users for all I know, but Galaxy is rather stable for me nowadays as well, however I haven't been playing GOG games lately.
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Tyrrhia: Well, I said “many” but, really, it’s not really that many (who said word repetition was bad? :P ). It’s just that I see more people criticising Galaxy for its “unstable state” than people defending it on the GOG forums.

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skeletonbow: ~infosnip~
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Tyrrhia: Hmm, yeah, resetting would be a bad idea (though it would be kind of fine if this version had a ‘b’ or “beta” appended to it). Thanks for the insight!
Well, don't know many other examples, but Minecraft did that - Mojang restarted version count after beta. Not a very useful piece of information, just some trivia, I guess. :p
Posted February 19, 2017
@Devs;
Suggestion for GOG Galaxy.

How about if it could remember wich display it was closed on when it starts?
Post edited February 21, 2017 by ELFswe
Posted February 20, 2017
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Taro94: I really hope something finally happens in regard to Galaxy. It's been... half a year? Without any major features appearing. Heck, this is beta, it should get updates frequently, yet I've noticed that Steam has more updates than this.

I am a GOG fanboy, but seriously, it's difficult to find valid excuses for nothing except little bugfixes happening at all.
While I generally agree with skeletonbow, it's the lack of communication on the issue that is the real cause of concern here. They have more than hinted a time or two that 1.2 wasn't that far off, personally I expect to see it before Gwent officially releases since that is very integrated with Galaxy.
Posted February 20, 2017
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Tyrrhia: Well, I said “many” but, really, it’s not really that many (who said word repetition was bad? :P ). It’s just that I see more people criticising Galaxy for its “unstable state” than people defending it on the GOG forums.
Perhaps it's hard to tell because many of us who defend it also criticize it. :) I like to think of myself as being rather neutral and balanced about it overall. I do have a pro-Galaxy bias, but I try to be as objective about it in every way I can. Additionally I form my opinions under the premise that GOG is a good and pro-consumer company that aims to do well for their customers ultimately and that any shortcomings that arise are experimental growing pains and learning along the way rather than that of ill intent, so when they screw up I might call them out on it like many would but with some understanding and brotherly love behind it more so than angst. :)

I mention this because myself and others that do praise Galaxy and GOG over time are sometimes seen as biased fanboys to some degree or another perhaps because people either haven't seen or have somehow forgotten the criticism and flaws etc. that we also share over time.

In short I think that there is plenty of both praise and criticism of Galaxy (and GOG) here in the forums, but that overall people have a higher tendency to complain about something when they see it as wrong than to praise it when they see it as right - and risk being coined a fanboy or whatever. I also think that people observe and participate more highly in the negative side of discussions due to more continual disagreement so the discussions drag on longer, whereas if people agree with each other on something more universally then the discussion ends sooner. It's not often one would see people continue to agree on something over and over endlessly as a sort of anti-argument of sorts (although that would be hilarious!) :)

In shorter than that: The forums, if not all online forums are negative biased by nature. :)
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ELFswe: @Devs;
Suggestion for GOG Galaxy.

How about if it could remember wich screen it was closed on when it starts?
Shit, I love that idea! Steam client could use that feature as well (if it doesn't already have it).

Update: I just discovered that Galaxy in fact does have this feature already, you just have to turn it on in settings if it isn't already.

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BKGaming: While I generally agree with skeletonbow, it's the lack of communication on the issue that is the real cause of concern here. They have more than hinted a time or two that 1.2 wasn't that far off, personally I expect to see it before Gwent officially releases since that is very integrated with Galaxy.
Dang, I think you may have just figured something out sort of... The first public beta of Galaxy went live a week before The Witcher 3 was released in order to capitalize on the fanfare from that, which was a brilliant idea for Galaxy uptake (despite some of the downsides). Now you have me thinking that they are perhaps planning on rolling out Galaxy client 1.2 a few weeks prior to the official release of GWENT, and that quite probably the full GWENT experience will be integrated with Galaxy features that are not yet available, such as cloud storage for example (which tops the wishlist), and probably some of the in-game-store or whatever features it presumably will have in the end. (Admittedly it's been a while since I tested GWENT so not sure what its state is currently to get an idea of such features theoretically.)

It would actually make a tremendous amount of sense to coincide Galaxy 1.2 a few weeks before the GWENT release, however unlike how they did it with The Witcher 3 where everything was much more of a mess of instability, they seem to be keeping it internal to flesh it out until it is more consumer-ready for beta. I mean lets face it, the original Galaxy public beta was much more "alpha" in stability, while I'd say what we have right now is more in line with a beta classification. Presumably they want to keep it that way, as a new release with a great decline in stability would likely put a big dent in their existing userbase whom use the product every day as a "stable" product despite the beta moniker.

Deep thoughts... :)
Post edited February 21, 2017 by skeletonbow
Posted February 20, 2017
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skeletonbow: Perhaps it's hard to tell because many of us who defend it also criticize it. :) I like to think of myself as being rather neutral and balanced about it overall. I do have a pro-Galaxy bias, but I try to be as objective about it in every way I can. Additionally I form my opinions under the premise that GOG is a good and pro-consumer company that aims to do well for their customers ultimately and that any shortcomings that arise are experimental growing pains and learning along the way rather than that of ill intent, so when they screw up I might call them out on it like many would but with some understanding and brotherly love behind it more so than angst. :)
And that’s all fine. I think that people from the other side of the aisle (can you even say that in a non‐political context?) are much more biased in that they are of the opinion that clients must be DRM and thus that Galaxy is something that shall not be touched or even approached. (Though perhaps that is my own bias. :P )
Posted February 20, 2017
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Tyrrhia: And that’s all fine. I think that people from the other side of the aisle (can you even say that in a non‐political context?) are much more biased in that they are of the opinion that clients must be DRM and thus that Galaxy is something that shall not be touched or even approached. (Though perhaps that is my own bias. :P )
There are people who have an opinion of that nature and they're free to think that but of course naturally it doesn't change anything or matter for the most part when all is said and done. Tomorrow we'll all wake up and GOG Galaxy, Steam, Uplay, and various other gaming clients will continue to exist and be developed far into the future despite individual opinions about them. :) The rest is all line noise. :P
Posted February 20, 2017
To be fair, I do think that Galaxy is DRM for SOME games, as it is required to access multiplayer.
I've noticed this about GOG, that they assume if a game has a DRM-free single-player mode, then it can be said that this game is DRM-free. I strongly disagree.

Any game which requires verification by means of external servers for even part of its content is DRMed. Most games could easily do away with a direct connect by IP multiplayer mode at least as a DRM-free alternative to official game servers (which feature anti-cheat protection and stuff like this) and bam, they'd be DRM-free. But developers nowadays like the idea of multiplayer they could shut down any day, leaving consumers without multiplayer they paid for.

So yeah, I'm a bit bitter about GOG's policy of "DRM-free singleplayer is enough to classify the game as DRM-free", though I tend to simply avoid buying games with multiplayer DRM. I can understand that it's not easy for GOG to boycott DRM totally, they had to go for some compromise, I guess.

What I do NOT understand, however, is that CD Projekt Red uses this practice themselves, too. The Witcher Adventure Game features only Galaxy-based multiplayer. Why couldn't they provide a direct connect solution or at least LAN? Why do they themselves include DRM in their games, while their GOG sister prides themselves in offering DRM-free games? I could include Gwent as well, but it's still in beta and features like this might be added later on... but honestly I'm not too optimistic about this happening.

So, here's my little rant on the topic. Don't get me wrong, I still root for GOG, because that's as good as it gets at the moment when it comes to DRM-free games. It's just this one thing that grinds me gears the most.

I expect the response in spirit of "Well, that multiplayer requires server connection is as obvious as that it requires Internet access. Besides, how else would developers secure multiplayer against cheats if direct connect was available?"

To this sort of an argument I usually respond by pointing to Diablo 2. I think it's the prime example of how to do things right when it comes to DRM-free multiplayer.
The game provides closed Battle.Net, which is external server-based multiplayer with everything multiplayer can offer - rankings, anti-cheat security, etc. At the same time it still offers direct connect and LAN multiplayer modes. Are they secure against cheaters? Of course not, but once Blizzard decides to shut down D2 servers, you will STILL be able to play with your friends if you want so. This is what games nowadays should aim for - providing the DRM-free alternative to multiplayer that will still function once the game is no longer supported.

GOG, having specialized in old games, should be more than aware that server-based multiplayer is always shut off at some point. It's only because direct connect and LAN were more popular back then that we can still enjoy games like Heroes 3 or Unreal Tournament over the Internet. Should developers behaved back then like they do now, there would be no multiplayer remaining for these classics. And that's plain sad.
Post edited February 20, 2017 by Taro94
Posted February 21, 2017
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Taro94: snip
This is a discussion for another thread, not the beta thread. This has been discussed to death on here... and a lot of us do not consider it DRM. GOG is the one that determines what is and isn't DRM Free, in there view online MP does not fall under that.
Post edited February 21, 2017 by BKGaming
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