timppu: For those of us who keep our GOG installers on our own hard drives, having the same DirectX installers in each and every installer is bad, as it severely increases the space requirements for the installers.
For instance, I have 2366 GOG games. If e.g. 2000 or ever just 1500 of them had exactly the same DirectX installers and other possible requirements in them... no thanks.
Well, with 2100 games and 7.5TiB of installers (I keep soundtracks somewhere else) I come close.
Additional 200GiB would not make much of a difference.
But not every game requires a current DX version, most run with the standard installation since Windows 7.
For the others the online installer would be sufficient, which's size is only about 2MiB, instead of 95MiB.
The legacy C++ runtime collection has a size of less than 5MB, older games might need that, new games don't.
We get unnecessary baggage anyway. Instead of including ScummVM and DosBOX to every one of these games, it would be possible to just have it to download once. That's 30MB per ScummVM game.
Also every game comes with a baggage of 24MiB (gog*.*, support.ico,uninst*.*,webcache) already.
Currently, unexperienced people have no idea what they need to do if their games don't run.
There is no guide, no html file with links to the runtimes, no nothing.
So yes, I see it as a weak point.
But since most unexperienced people most likely rather use Galaxy than offline installers, it would be enough if Galaxy installed the required rutimes. Then again Galaxy's installer does not even install the runtimes that Galaxy requires to run in the first place. We got posts on the forum of people who can't get it to run because of that.
What GOG misses, is people who test their software on different systems.