Yep, I've been buying games here for almost 12 years now (as long as my marriage!) and they're still the only ones with a DRM free promise (which they've stuck to). People are too quick to focus on the negative or see nefarious plans, because that's how the internet works I guess. There's literally nowhere else promising and promoting DRM free versions of games though, so why throw a gift horse off a cliff.

Well, personally I have very little trust in anything, very rarely do I find myself wrong. We have seen other companies fold under this, humble, shiny loot are two examples. And ever since the release of galaxy there has been a lot of badly handled situations and such like which really hasn’t added any confidence.

That being said, don’t get me wrong here, it’s not the end of the world, and I still buy games here. It does not hurt to have the discussion , and to hopefully head off further “accidents” in the future.

well in a lot of the cases the games are old, and complete. It’s when things start being added to that there could be an issue. You could for instance run a list of original files, md5 or similar and know at least a certain base point. Whilst you don’t know what was in the original (and pools of radiance later release shows that can be dangerous), adding additional layers on top could remove compatibility and add further problems in.

I don‘t trust GOG, because they have a history of breaking promises like one world, one price or optional client (can‘t play Gwent without the OPTIONAL client) or now sneaking in some unnecessary stuff (which they tried before with including the optional client and only backed off when enough people complained). So, why should I trust GOG again?

Your choice of course, but not a fun way to live, always angry and mistrusting. GOG do their best, and there's no one else even trying. At some point it's better to dance with the one who brought you rather than go home alone.

I see it a bit differently, as I‘m not always angry and mistrusting. GOG have worked hard to earn my mistrust, becauseof their past and present actions.
There was a thread some years ago, where 6 „lucky“ people where invited into GOG headquarters and where told many things. One of these was „better communications towards customers“, but why does GOG not clerly state what these files are about and why they pack them in the offline installers? And there are many more questions that GOG could answer (like currently why they don’t have filters to filter games by price or why they don‘t offer older offline versions for download...these have been open for years now), but they decided to ignore them. For me, this is enough to not trust them.

there are filters to filter by price. maybe i don’t understand what you mean, but the store has filters for free, under certain amounts etc.
do you mean order by price?

ah. you mean order by price, not filter by. gotcha.

SInce I am one of those 6, I'll have to agree that they promised better communication here in the forums and in fact it got worse - especially since Judas seems to be MIA even though he is still working for GOG.

However regarding the "Galaxy files" I guess the problem is more a logistical one. GOG gets most of their files via Galaxy API and I guess (I'd have to ask a dev friend of mine to be absolutely sure) that the files in question are integrated whener devs use those features and create their GOG build. These are the files GOG is using afterwards to make the offline installers so it would get problematic remove them again since devs used them when they made their build. Of course these files won't be necessary in games that don' use any Galafy features in the first place.

But tbh, I don't see any problems in additional small files just because they are called galaxy...* as long as they don't do a thing whenever you aren'rt using the client (and I am sure it is easy to figure out if any of these files is actually doing a thing when Galaxy is not running). So maybe GOG decided it is not worth to explain these files and therefore create unnecessary discussions about files that don't do a thing when they aren't needed. It was different with the FEAR problematic since it could be proved that these files weren't completely inactive ... and they also were DRM which is arguable in the case of Galaxy since still every game can be played without Galaxy except GWENT.

And this is what I complain about. What one makes of it or how ones reaction is,that is up to every single person.

I thought that GOG packages the offline installer themselves and not done by the devs.

I would have less of a problem if GOG was open about this change and if they would make a news post on the start page saying what you just did. „They are needed for Galaxy drm client and can therefore not be deleted.“ But GOG being the shitty company they are, just silently change things and we are left in the dark and guessing.
That is why I don’t trust them.

Afaik the offline installers are created by GOG but they use the files they received from the devs. That's also the reason why offline installers are nearly always available later than the Galaxy version.

You got to visit the "hallowed halls"? Color me jealous(if just a bit). :)

Also(sadly)yeah, even in news/release threads where they ask for user input and replies you see maybe a dozen or less staff replies(almost as if taking a few minutes to answer a few more replies would be taxing on their time), which is sad to see....I think if they replied a bit more to people they'd gain some good PR & make gog look better, at any rate.

(Also I miss Judas posting as much as he used to...it was nice seeing him around the forums more way back when)
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If I may be blunt/open: You seem to distrust Gog a bit too easily, yet when Gog does right by us(which they have done several times even in the past year) you don't seem to acknowledge it(as far as I am aware....you might've done so and I missed it) much or give them more trust back as quickly as you take it away.

Of course that could be down to personal ways of doing things(slow to trust/etc), so I can somewhat understand why you might be that way.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Basically the build is linked to the Galaxy API, just leaving out the DLL will simply crash the game - either instantly on load, or when the API is called to ie. report an achievement. The API then talks to the Galaxy client if present - if not, it simply does nothing.

It's the same with the steam*.dlls included with some games here. The game requires it to work at all. Some of those dlls are "stubs", meaning their API calls don't do anything at all. Some have been known to actually talk to a Steam client if it was installed and running - there were threads about it.

GOG could include stub Galaxy*.dlls with the offline installers - but what for? For people not using Galaxy at all it doesn't change a thing except saving a few laughable kilobytes. For people using the offline installers (slow download speeds...) and Galaxy it would be an extra hoop to jump through to replace the stub with the real thing. Makes no sense.


Stop spreading FUD.

IMHO that's a common issues of peoples having no clue how development works considering themselves specialist just because they suddenly look at the content of the install folder or download some "hacking" tool.

That's similar to the "Securom is a rootkit" scandal of a couple year back which was caused, once again, by peoples using a tool while having no idea how it worked (RootkitRevealer in this case), as much as I hate Securom I always found that silly, there is enough things wrong with DRM without needing to spread any FUD.

Having statically linked DLL / libraries is something nearly as old as software developments goes and while it's possible to have the same DLL dynamically linked and loaded it's usually more hassle than is it worth. If we were still in 1999 and having a couple of extra megabytes of "useless" binaries was a big issue I could understand, but nowadays where HD space is calculated in TB having a couple of inert DLL in the game folder is not really a significant issue for the majority of users.


That did try a little at first, clarifying the forum rules, hiring a new community manager, etc... sadly after the stupid twitter controversies and the firing Linko they have mostly gone into full "mute" mode and their presence on the forum are now limited to basic moderation and game removal posts.

I think you mean the XCP software which was indeed a rootkit installed as copy protection software by Sony audio CDs in 2005.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal