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General discussionGOG Galaxy Beta starts now(1170 posts)(1170 posts)
(1170 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted May 06, 2015
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!
Posted May 06, 2015
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crnisokol: So what about achievements? Only Witcher 2 for now?
Achievements are something that individual game developers will have to decide whether they want their games on GOG.com to have or not, and if so they'll have to update their game to add support for Galaxy achievements and issue a game update for this new feature. If a game developer does not add the feature to their games then they wont have that on the GOG version of their games at all.

I suspect that as the Galaxy infrastructure matures and comes out of beta that we will see some of GOG's game publisher partners updating their games to add support for achievements and/or other features if their games have similar features on Steam or elsewhere, but it is ultimately something that is up to the developer/publisher of the game to decide whether or not to include support for it to their games.

The only games I'd expect to potentially see such features with on Galaxy directly from GOG would be the 3 Witcher games as those are the only 3 games they own (well, their sister company CDPR anyway) excluding the 2 new old DOS games they acquired the rights to, but I don't expect to see any ancient classic games having modern gaming client features added to them for a variety of technical reasons.

In short, it's up to the game developers/publishers to add these features to their games and push updates to GOG. I imagine that is or will be happening but I wouldn't expect much until the service is out of beta.
Posted May 06, 2015
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MIK0: You should know better that at GOG they never get back on their words, until they do! :D
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john_hatcher: You are right there. I will tell you what will happen in time (let it be 1 or 2 years after release, but IT WILL HAPPEN). Standalone installers will be removed and everyone will need Galaxy to download and play the games. I know that many people will now say "no will never happen", but time will prove me right.
And if this happens then I'll have the backup of all the games I bought until then and I'll spend the last 100 years of my life finishing my backlog.

You know, it's also a fact that at some point in time I will die. It doesn't mean that I wake up every day complaining about it. I take every day as it comes and try to get the most of it. I'd recommend to do the same here, you'll see that life is much more fun than worrying for things that might happen and against which you have no control anyway.
Posted May 06, 2015
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IAmSinistar: Was chatting with Judas about the Assign Tags function, and apparently he doesn't even have it! I though it might be only enabled on installed games, and since I haven't installed any through Galaxy yet it doesn't do anything for me. But since he doesn't have it all, I'm really wondering about it.

I'm attaching a screenshot of where the function appears in Galaxy for me. If anyone has this and can get it to work, please let us know.
Assign Tags function appear a while for me when I was in alpha build but as you like mentioned it was grayed out as unfunctional. So now I'm get hands on to beta but there is no Assign Tags function anymore.
Posted May 06, 2015
I have a suggestion, let us add friends by mail or username cause serching from them in the community etc is very tedious.
Posted May 06, 2015
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gaddarmice: Assign Tags function appear a while for me when I was in alpha build but as you like mentioned it was grayed out as unfunctional. So now I'm get hands on to beta but there is no Assign Tags function anymore.
Interesting. So it is probably appearing in my Galaxy client as an artifact from the alpha install which didn't get removed by the beta update. I'll stop worrying about why it does nothing, then.

Thanks!
Post edited May 06, 2015 by IAmSinistar
Posted May 06, 2015
I finally could upgrade. Seems to be as ugly as the alpha and without better game management, but now I can clearly see that I have got no friends. Nice one, GOG...
xD
Posted May 06, 2015
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BKGaming: The thing is... even if they did for whatever reason get rid of the standalone installers and make Galaxy mandatory. There is no reason the games still can't be DRM free. ...
Agreed, it can be. But there is some reasoning why they actually might make them DRMed. As I said:

"Something like this is possible. After all they are a company who wants to make profit, not a charity organization for the prosperity of the DRM free. And if no AAA games come here in the future because of DRM, if the shareholders of CDP are demanding changes, if different people are at the top of GOG and CDP, ... well, a mere possibility can become realistic fast."

I don't want to say they must, only they could. So it's the other way around, there is no guarantee they stay DRM free. Obviously with DRM being the only big difference to Steam it's not difficult to believe this difference will fall too at some point. Steam is very successful after all and as a CDP shareholder I would follow suspiciously how much the DRM free goodwill brings financially for CDP.

What about having both, DRMed and DRM free games on GOG for a start? Wouldn't be such a big shift, wouldn't it. So just make the client mandatory for some new shiny AAA games and keep the rest DRM free. Same slippery slope as with regional pricing and we know how fast GOG embraced regional pricing for most of their games.

I just mention all this to convince you that the fears of some that GOG might go DRM have some validity (whatever the official stance of GOG may be at the moment).

We can as well see it as a serious risk.
Post edited May 06, 2015 by Trilarion
Posted May 06, 2015
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JudasIscariot:
What are the chances that we could get a sub-forum dedicated to Galaxy here soon?

This thread is moving so fast that some posts are getting buried quickly and people are already posting random questions in the General forum. It's only going to get worse. A dedicated forum would be a great way to centralize everything and maybe help people ask questions and find answers more quickly and easily. The forum search function would also work better in a smaller dedicated forum as well...
Posted May 06, 2015
How long are we supposed to be waiting for the invite? I signed up yesterday midday. I cant wait any longer!
Posted May 06, 2015
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yyahoo: What are the chances that we could get a sub-forum dedicated to Galaxy here soon?
I second the motion.
Posted May 06, 2015
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cal74: And if this happens then I'll have the backup of all the games I bought until then and I'll spend the last 100 years of my life finishing my backlog.

You know, it's also a fact that at some point in time I will die. It doesn't mean that I wake up every day complaining about it. I take every day as it comes and try to get the most of it. I'd recommend to do the same here, you'll see that life is much more fun than worrying for things that might happen and against which you have no control anyway.
funny... I think I'll need to live another 200 years to clear my back log (assuming I never play my favorites more than once)...
Posted May 06, 2015
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crnisokol: So what about achievements? Only Witcher 2 for now?
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skeletonbow: Achievements are something that individual game developers will have to decide whether they want their games on GOG.com to have or not, and if so they'll have to update their game to add support for Galaxy achievements and issue a game update for this new feature. If a game developer does not add the feature to their games then they wont have that on the GOG version of their games at all.

I suspect that as the Galaxy infrastructure matures and comes out of beta that we will see some of GOG's game publisher partners updating their games to add support for achievements and/or other features if their games have similar features on Steam or elsewhere, but it is ultimately something that is up to the developer/publisher of the game to decide whether or not to include support for it to their games.

The only games I'd expect to potentially see such features with on Galaxy directly from GOG would be the 3 Witcher games as those are the only 3 games they own (well, their sister company CDPR anyway) excluding the 2 new old DOS games they acquired the rights to, but I don't expect to see any ancient classic games having modern gaming client features added to them for a variety of technical reasons.

In short, it's up to the game developers/publishers to add these features to their games and push updates to GOG. I imagine that is or will be happening but I wouldn't expect much until the service is out of beta.
I was going to buy Witcher 3 on Steam just because of achievements, but now I hope they'll have them on Galaxy too, so I can buy directly from developers (kinda).
Posted May 06, 2015
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Trilarion: I just mention all this to convince you that the fears of some that GOG might go DRM have some validity (whatever the official stance of GOG may be at the moment).
I think you have to see this in the perspective that the only reason that GOG enjoys the kind of popularity it does is because of the DRM-free angle. We've seen what happens when a distibutor branches out into DRM'd games (GamersGate, Desura, Shinyloot) - they lose their audience and destroy their credibility as a result.

As soon as GOG abandons its DRM-free principles, it might as well just shut up shop, because everyone will either simply abandon PC gaming, resort to piracy, or use Steam only. It will literally have no selling point left (especially given that the lack of regionalisation is now history). GOG's management isn't stupid - they know this.

With the possible exception of Desura (which essentially continues to hang on for dear life on the single thread of it being the distribution pendant of IndieDB and ModDB), I would expect GamersGate and Shinyloot to disappear in the near future. Even Humble Store has destroyed its raison d'être and only continues to exist thanks to the bundles (and anecdotal evidence suggests that sales on that one too are poor).
Post edited May 06, 2015 by jamyskis
Posted May 06, 2015
Technical question before I install this: How much RAM does the client hog?

I like it lean on my not-so-mean machine Win 7 laptop (2 GHZ dual, 4 GB RAM)
Posted May 06, 2015
Clarification, games are only recognized by Galaxy atm if they are directly installed by it? I've been playing Chroma Squad but Galaxy did not recognize it.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionGOG Galaxy Beta starts now(1170 posts)(1170 posts)
(1170 posts)