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Try the DRM-free online gaming platform.

<span class="bold">GOG Galaxy</span>: our truly gamer-friendly, DRM-free online gaming platform. As we shared our vision with the world, we promised auto-patching, social functionality like chat, friends lists, and achievements. We promised our own multiplayer support and cross-play with Steam. Most importantly, we promised truly optional.



Today we deliver.
The <span class="bold">GOG Galaxy</span> client enters beta, open to anyone, with the most important functionality ready to try, test, enjoy (and break) at your leisure. We're proud to have gotten this far, and we know that we couldn't have done it without you all - that's everyone who spent months in alpha testing, that's those of you who talked to us about your needs and expectations, and it's every single one of you that has supported us since ever. So thanks, GOG Galaxy is for you!

With the <span class="bold">GOG Galaxy Beta</span>, you can install your games in one click and keep them up to date automatically, the beta currently supports this feature in all but a couple of titles available here. You can also perform backups easily by downloading a standalone installer through GOG Galaxy. The beta features a friends list, game time tracking, achievements, and chat. You can now talk to each other, connect with your group of friends, and see what everyone is playing. You can also try out our online multiplayer & matchmaking solution that, in select titles, includes cross-play: platform-independent multiplayer between gamers on GOG.com and Steam. If you download a patch that breaks something or if you just change your mind, the app will soon feature a unique rollback option to restore a previous version of your game.

Best of all, GOG Galaxy is optional. If you don't want to use any additional software, your experience with us won't change at all. If you only want to take advantage of select conveniences, you can toggle them on and off. It's all totally up to you.

You can sign up for the <span class="bold">GOG Galaxy Beta</span> and find out more on <span class="bold">gog.com/galaxy</span>, where we tell you about the features and answer many of the questions you may have. We'll be watching the forums carefully, so feel free to leave a comment if there is anything else that you'd like to know!
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vanchann: Using Galaxy as a downloader, I'd like to make a few comments about its functionality.

1. Trying to download a game installer from "download extras" the client redownloads the full installer, even if it already exists. Every time I clicked on an installer it was fully redownloaded, even if it was just downloaded through Galaxy too. GOG downloader's functionality of checking the files before it downloads them is not present here.

2. I cannot find I way to download and backup any DLCs through Galaxy. They aren't shown.

3. Update flags are not shown when I check my library through Galaxy.
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sharpman: I can confirm that some DLC are not visible (Divinity Original Sin Source Hunter; Don't Starve Reign of the Giants). I had to install them manually.
Currently Galaxy handles DLC much the way Steam does where it will automatically add any and all DLC you own for said game when you install it, if you don't want the DLC then you just click on the game and got to config from the more menu and then disable the DLC and it will remove it from the game and leave you with a vanilla version or one without the specific DLC you didn't want installed.

See attachment
Attachments:
dlcgalaxy.jpg (220 Kb)
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AmethystViper: You're missing a key feature about GOG Galaxy. The GOG Staff is not forcing anybody to use GOG Galaxy. It's entirely up to you if you want to use it or not.
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Banichi: For now, they say.

Have you read GOG Galaxy's EULA to determine if they can change it at whim? I would be deeply shocked if they surrendered any right to do what they please in an actual contract.
For now, I do get tired of hearing that. Yeah for now, in all reality anyone can do take something away from you in a drop of a hat or force you to use something you don't want unless you completely remove it or go elsewhere. But that doesn't mean they will and think about it this way, what would GOG get out of this in the end? they know what brought them to the dance old games and no DRM and while yes they have changed on things like Regional pricing but they are still selling old games despite every tinfoil screaming that GOG was abandoning it for newer games years ago and they are probably going to stay DRM free since that is one thing that sets them apart from every other storefront out there they don't sell steam keys, their client isn't manditory or required to play your games save for online multiplayer. How many other stores can say that, that are in GOG position? none so why get rid of that and be just another steam clone in a sea of steam clones? It's just bad bussiness.

Take for example TNA wrestling, they spent 12 years trying to compete with WWE by copying WWE and look where that got them.. they are in the hole millions of dollars, what few standout talent they had has left for New Japan, ROH or WWE's developmental NXT brand and they are now on a small network desperately fighting for veiwers. Why because no one wants to have a second rate knock off a established product. Or if your prefer look at Impulse all the guy in charge of it did was try and beat Steam by being a shitty knock off of Steam and look at where they are now, a lifeless husk owned by Gamestop. Origin and Uplay only hang on because your forced to use them to play EA and Ubisoft's games if they changed that those two would be dead and forgotten in a very short time.

So from a business standpoint it's not to GOG's advantage to force Galaxy as a manditory thing because then they become another second rate steam knock off and then they are finished. So unless CD Projekt puts a complete idiot in charge of GOG a mandatory Galaxy is not going to happen
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lostwolfe: this, please. many times over. and setting profiles [when they arrive] to private.
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ZenWan: Groete, lostwolfe. :-)

Absolutely! Has a blue responded? A search didn't turn up any response to this, and it's important to me - but perhaps not important to enough people. :-(

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skeletonbow: Indeed, that's something that has always puzzled me personally.

<snip>

With online digital realtime communications such as instant messaging I tend to use it exactly like that telephone. Just like my phone is plugged in and turned on all the time, my instant messaging almost always is too. The "skeletonbow is online" indicator is analogous to my telephone ringing essentially indicating to people that it is actually plugged in. It doesn't indicate that I am sitting there waiting for them to message me 24/7 however. It means that they can try to contact me if they like and if I'm there I may respond, and if I'm not - leave a message.

I have a certain number of technically sensible people who use it that way too and it works just fine, much like a telephone. But then there are those people who totally don't get it, and think that if your IM is running and you're showing online, that means that you are sitting right there and they can message you whenever they want and expect a response back in a very brief window of time, and if they don't hear back from you they think perhaps you're ignoring them or being an ass or something. I'll end up getting instant messages from such people like: "Hey, how's it going?" ... "Hey are you there?" ... "Hello?" ... "HELLO?????" ... "OK FINE THEN, BE A DICK!!"

<snip>
It seems that the people who communicate that way tend to be people who focus on drama and making negative assumptions about people and their motivations when they're unsure about something - rather than giving the benefit of doubt and waiting to ask the person. I don't have a lot of time in my life to give to such folks though, so <REMOVE> works in lieu of <INVISIBLE> just fine too though. :)
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ZenWan: laughing! I don't seem to know people like that, but I understand what you're saying. I do value my privacy very much, and I like to be able to choose if I'm visible online or not. Most sites give you that option, I hope that GOG will do the same, especially for those who are playing a game.
Every IM client I've used always at least has an "away" option. That sounds like it should solve your problems.

It also usually kicks in after 5 or so minutes of inactivity.
Since I had nothing better to do, I asked the developers of a few games whether they were planning Galaxy achievements for their games. These were the responses.

Long Live the queen
"Galaxy's not a high priority for us as my primary coder is a linux geek and the galaxy stuff is, last I checked, not very linux-friendly."

Chroma Squad
"We don't know yet.
Let's evaluate it in a near feature."

Freedom Planet
"Maybe in the future, but right now no one really has the access to implement these things."

So, maybe.
After using the client for the past couple of days and adding my large library of 968ish games, here's my experiences. I've had experience with betas and alphas before so I know some or all of this will change.

After attaching all my games to the client, it takes a very long time to be functional when starting it. It's been scanning my collection for about 4 minutes now with RAM usage getting up to 708MB and CPU usage of 40-45% on a i5-3570k. The spinning loading icon is still spinning on all the icons and the client is unusable as it loads. This takes somewhere around 10 minutes before the icons all pop up and the client becomes functional again. I can tell from my hard drive activity that when the client loads it then browses the folders to pull up all the icon files for the individual games. It seems like this would all be kept in a database to not have to poll it all every time, but I'm not a programmer so I don't know the reasons for not doing that. All I can say is that Steam starts almost immediately for me with around the same number of games installed and browsing the library is very quick with no lag. Again, I know this is a beta so performance will improve.

The downloading of Extras is poorly implemented. It's fine if you only want to view one artbook or one particular soundtrack, but having to go into each game's menu and download the extras one by one is not very convenient. It would be my preference that you could do it right from the pop up menu in the library view.

Prerequisite software has pop up requests and notifications, and they display after a game is installed, and downloads are paused when a game is installing. So if you have a couple of files in the queue to download, for example a game and an add on pack, and you leave it to go fix dinner or whatever, you will come back to the client waiting for your input and then you'll have to wait for the second file to download. If this could all be worked into the EULA agreement for installing a game, or install the prerequisites first, then perhaps that would be more convenient.

Additionally, we need to have an option to keep the installer files after a game is installed.

I like the design of the client. It seems very clean. The store integration seems to work perfectly for me. I hope that the game pages will be more filled out, maybe with a snippet and link to that games' forum.

Most of the icons have loaded now. It seems like I force it to respond if I drive the scroll bar down and view other games or scroll back and forth. Some of the icons never load, but just keep spinning. Let me know if you need to know which ones. After the icons have loaded it picks up the speed again and I can browse everything normally and it's currently using 12% CPU and 714MB Ram. Minimizing it to the taskbar had no effect on that. Switching between game pages lags a bit.

I haven't added any GOG friends so I can't test that yet unfortunately. Overall I am pleased with it and can't wait until the performance is increased.
Post edited May 09, 2015 by guynamedbilly
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ChumpThump: Every IM client I've used always at least has an "away" option. That sounds like it should solve your problems.

It also usually kicks in after 5 or so minutes of inactivity.
+1 and thanks and for your response,. I hope that Galaxy will include - or has included - that option as part of its chat feature with the option to change to 'away' manually, not just after a certain amount of inactivity..If I'm playing a game through Galaxy, I prefer that to remain private.
I haven't yet restarted after installing my Galaxy, so I can't say. Has anyone seen that feature? If it's not there, I hope they'll add it.
Can we get a list of Galaxy enabled multiplayer games somewhere please? I'd like to know which games in my library should be Galaxy'd so I get to have chums to ki...play with. :D
Prob many people have asked but are there cloud saves at some point and I haven't tried beta.
I'll just leave this here DJCA59E5
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gaddarmice: I'll just leave this here DJCA59E5
Thank you!

I couldn't wait any longer to get my key :)
Everyone who is concerned about the optionality of Galaxy, vote here:

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/be_optional_till_the_end_of_days
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Antimateria: Prob many people have asked but are there cloud saves at some point and I haven't tried beta.
The word "cloud" is mentioned only once on https://www.gog.com/galaxy, in the sentence "For all games, you can download a DRM-free backup installer that you can save to an external disk, drive or cloud.", similarly, "save" is mentioned twice, once in the aforementioned sentence, and once in "We save your playtime only. If you let us." There is no mention of cloud saves anywhere.
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russellskanne: Everyone who is concerned about the optionality of Galaxy, vote here:

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/be_optional_till_the_end_of_days
Thanks. Voted.
I searched this entire thread for the word "scrollbar" and it came up empty.

Is it already a known issue on MacOS that the scrollbar isn't being drawn in correctly? I've got a tall white column on the right, but no "scroller" (scroll box, scroll thumb) to show me where I am on the page.

(I have "Show scroll bars" set to "Always" in the OS general settings.)
I've just tried to purchase the Witcher 3 expansion pass and silver with the beta and have encountered 2 problems:

1) when I got to the check out Silver disappears from my basket.

2) When I click to pay with paypal I cannot view the paypal screen, which is a GOG screen not a browser screen. It's strange, on my task bar GOG shows 2 windows though but I just cannot select the paypal screen.