I got this "Essential components needed to start GOG Galaxy are missing. Please reinstall the application." error. So I did what the message suggested and reinstalled GOG Galaxy into the same initial installation folder which was called "Games" and contained ALL the games on my HDD. After installation I saw that Galaxy apparently deleted everything else in that folder. Now I have a "Games" folder with just the Galaxy client in it. All my GOG games, all my Steam games - gone.

I've always been an ardent supporter of GOG, but now I have to say that I'm a bit pissed off. :(

EDIT:

To clarify things, this is what my setup looked like:

D:\games\GalaxyClient
D:\games\GOGGames
D:\games\Steam
D:\games\[some other game-related stuff]

Actual games from GOG were installed in \GOGGames. Now, after reinstalling (where I didn't change my install directory D:\games\GalaxyClient - I thought "why should I?") it looked like this:

D:\games\GalaxyClient

Everything else in D:\games\ was gone.

As a non-galaxy-participant (for the time being) it feels as if I'm a civilian, whereas the galaxy users are brave gog soldiers fighting on some faraway battlefield, who occasionally write home to their loved ones with "Add me friend" threads. And all that I can think of, as I hear from my friends about the latest casualty from the front, a young private named stereophil, is how relieved I am that I didn't decide to join the army.

+1

Just here to drop my +1 on Matewis as well, but yes, stereophil, that sounds awful. Condolences.

+1

That was beautiful. *wipes away manly tears*

On topic, this seems a bit hard to believe. I don't think I've ever had a single program which "accidentally" uninstalled/removed files which belong to other programs ( such as games ). I'd call that malware.

I don't know, if this is true, then GOG better do something about their rabid game client, before it devours us all! Just as well that I decided to ignore Galaxy for now.

Thank you, mate. *wiping the tears*

I'm sorry to hear that. And don't feel bad about being a tad pissed at GOG. Such a bug is simply inexcusable and shouldn't ever happen. I hope the Galaxy devs get their shit together very soon especially since this is not the first time that someone has reported this kind of behaviour on the forums.

Yeah I wish this wasn't true, too. The last time I heard about that kind of bug was sometime in the end of the 90s, when GameStar (German gaming mag) wrote about a game doing pretty much the same.

Thanks for your condolences, guys!

Yeah, the program should at least have some kind of confirmation about deleting things before wiping a hard drive of valuables.

I guess you never tried uninstalling Half-Life from C:\Program Files\Half-Life (as opposed to C:\Program Files\Sierra On-Line\Half-Life). Fun times ;)

that's the second post of this type I see. if there are people having this problem and reporting there are people having this problem and not reporting it.

this is a bad kind of problem to have.

That would have been nice, yes.

However, I guess the devs just haven't considered such a possibility yet when writing the installer or something like that. I hope this can be fixed soon to prevent it from happening again.

Meanwhile, I will just keep wiping my tears.

EDIT: I've reported the problem, of course.

You should contact GOG to see if they can make up for it with some store credit at least. And to make sure they fix these issues, of course. They're not going to "dethrone" Steam with a games client that randomly wipes HDDs. :/
Indeed, I have not. But normally a program should only uninstall or override its own files, and not execute a blanket HDD wipe of files it shouldn't even "know" about.

Maybe this is actually a feature: Galaxy recognized Steam installations on OPs HDD, and decided to perform some kind of DRM exorcism. Working as intended. :P

I'm sorry for your loss.

I'm even sorrier GOG threw all their support at this poor excuse for a client.