Not trying to start bs or anything I'm just wondering if the ambitions for gog have been downgraded. I was real hopeful with 2.0 it would be a bunch of updates after that, but it's been pretty minimal. Just wondering if there is something that happened?

If you mean that ratty old Galaxy client? Who knows. Frankly, a lot of us grognards feel it to be a complete WOMBAT.

Just to put it into words that the management understands: Strata pieniędzy, mózgu i czasu.

Yes, they haven't invested into Galaxy since at least since Q4 2023 when they've started tracking R&D costs for GOG on their presentations.

Galaxy failed to capture market share and now is a burden on all offline installers because they've been programmed to detect / wait for a Galaxy handshake on launch because of the Steam wrapper primarily for achievement hunters.

EDIT: Q4 2023, not 2024.

I would not like gog dying.....Then I am reminded of a certain dwarf slapping a certain king over bad decisions, in a story about thrones or something xD

....especially when staff right this moment have plausible ideas they could implement that steam does not have. Like actual preservation ideas, I have mentioned ad nauseam. Oh well.

To save money they could just work more with Lutris and Heroic. They do almost everything that Galaxy does (with more features being added), they work on Linux, and it would allow them to put yhe money from the Galaxy Client to other things like game updates or getting more games on GOG.

I would love it if people stopped confusing GOG with Galaxy.

Me! I still miss the GOG downloader every single time I download games from my library. It was so easy to use, low on resources, so quick and simple without any bloat. It also didn't need to 'phone home' every time you launched a game either. Definitely this.

Indeed. For sure, I used to miss it and would maybe even use a Lite version of Galaxy, that put Offline Installers front and center and got rid of the bloat and unnecessary features.

But nowadays I use my own GUI with a third party program (gogcli.exe) and curl.exe, and I feel much much better served.

Very much so. By the time I arrived to GOG and was using the GOG Downloader, I think it was already out of date/ considered unsupported, but it was working fine for me. Imo, the GOG Downloader program, which in computer program terminology would technically also qualify as a "client application", is the only type of "client application" GOG should have ever had. My belief is that there was no good reason for them to take away the option of using GOG Downloader in the unsupported state.

However, as I like to say and have said numerous times over the years, everything on this store instantly makes so much more sense when taking the perspective that the goal is to get as many people on Galaxy as possible. I forget in this case the exact reason we were given as to why it was dropped but it was either an intentional choice or an essentially forced choice if, for instance, a Galaxy update or site update was the cause of Downloader no longer being able to work (even in unsupported state like it had been working).

I also believe GOG should drop support for Galaxy, to move back to a more purely DRM-free way. Leave Galaxy unsupported; those who wish to use it anyway can just like people who used Downloader, everyone else can use the offline installers (and the offline installers can finally become primary focus again). That may not sound fair to Galaxy users, but perhaps I am biased because "offline installer-only, and never download them using Galaxy" users are not exactly the favored class on this store. So I say, what's good for the goose is good for the, er, Galaxy.

And yes, to second Breja's post, GOG != Galaxy, no matter how much some may wish for the equation to instead compute.

I would love it if Galaxy stopped

The appeal of DRM-free gaming still seems totally at odds with the appeal of a launcher. I don't understand why anyone would buy games from GOG, then download/install/play them using Galaxy. Why not just buy them on Steam?

Maybe because they don't really know the purpose of GoG, and may even not know that the offline installers exist and are actually a thing. Considering the general state of gaming in this day and age, what with a majority of games requiring online connectivity, and the more recent generations treating gaming as mostly a throwaway activity. It's not that difficult to understand...

I can tell you why I do. I think it's the best of both worlds as long as the launcher is optional. If I would buy my games on Steam I would not be able to play them without launcher at all - for me this is a big difference.

I would love if Galaxy went the way of that GOG downloader that I've only heard about and never got to experience.

RIP Galaxy.