I post about it before, but in a "sarcastic" way. It's pretty clear is not a feature requested by the user base, guess who makes "requests" to Galaxy dev team?

I remember when the Beta updates on Galaxy were optional, until they weren't.

Cool idea, GOG staff really takes the "one store fits all" approach in a very serious way. GOG is alright and Epic and the other storefriends are also alright I guess :>!

I have a question though, will this also apply to stores like itch.io?

At any case, hopefully everything you guys are planning will work out fine.

Right...

So GOG/CDP did the usual corporate speil, rope in customers under a good, old idea of days of yore (DRM-Free) and then they proceed to throw them under the bus to get all the "normies" monies once they had their overrated hit, can't say I am surprised really.

Now not only does EPIC not have to put money or effort into their own pathetic excuse of a client they now have GOG as their lackeys, but GOG do it for completely free!

Well done, in making a deal with a devil who is completely anti-consumer you have in turn made a deal with a red devil who strong-arms gaming companies under the wing of the CCP.

I am totally done, it is all so tiresome.

Hope Sweeney pays well, because clearly he has PC gamers best interests in mind, what with us being nothing but pirate scumbags, he caught whiff of Steam's success and wanted a piece of that pie.

I'm glad that the sentiment is being approached! Thank you for taking the time to formulate this enlightening syntactic window into a much-demanded initiative that will simply make it easier to address the beneficial adaptation of the diversity of realities between the GOG.COM store and the necessary inclusion of all games from all platforms inside the optional GOG GALAXY 2.0 that replaces the file downloader.

This post helps how exactly? Want to address how this incredibly short-sighted deal with Epic benefits everyone except GOG? How all it does is promote the Epic store and how it will encourage developers to not even bother with DRM free installers for GOG? Or why you're getting in bed with a company so ethically questionable that they're at odds with a lot of the GOG users in the first place? Mind addressing the fact GOG is now willfully selling a single player game with DRM while you're at it? Or how about the bold faced lie that this multi-store buying feature is the "most requested" when forum users have completely debunked such a notion?

Doesn't matter how many times you repeat the word optional, it still sounds like GOG is going all-in on Galaxy and screwing over the DRM free concept along with the fanbase who got them here in the process.

Modern games are so built around the use of clients that it's hard not to instinctively prefer them on some level. The only reason I care about the backup offline installers is the principle of it, not the function. It's not like I won't install a client on my system, I think they're very useful and convenient for new games. People who act like clients themselves are evil have to be an insanely small percentage of gamers.

That said older games... the games GOG was originally all about... work better without the client IMO. Anything pre-2010 or so, or maybe a little earlier I guess. My goal one day is to have the offline installers of all that stuff backed up and stored somewhere.

Well, this is a lie. What is this, a political campaign ad?

Galaxy is mandatory for many games on the store, and GOG customer service has basically been reduced to "install Galaxy to fix your issues".

All games that are brought to the GOG store are required to have Galaxy integration, requiring developers to devote additional resources to creating and implementing this. They're not allowed to simply provide DRM-free installers.

Many of us have been saying since Day One that Galaxy was intended from the very beginning to be mandatory, and more and more functionality of the entire GOG store and experience will be shifted to it over time.

"organize your games" pfffffffffffft

Yeah, this isn't very convincing.

It's not just "Galaxy" but "GOG Galaxy". For some time now it's been the primary focus of GOG.com; you've spent the past few years building GOG Galaxy into the core of GOG.com; it's heavily promoted throughout GOG.com's website; it's heavily promoted via user account pages; you've even used deceptive tactics reminiscent of malware to try to trick people into installing it when they wanted the offline installers (e.g. misleading download buttons, bundling Galaxy client installer with games and automatically installing Galaxy by default).

Many games are not released here at all because developers want feature parity with Steam etc. and consider it too much work to implement Galaxy support; many games here do not include their Linux versions because there's no Galaxy client for Linux. Updates for many games are delayed or just not offered at all except via Galaxy. It's not as "optional" a thing as claimed.

Every so often we get posts here from users of the offline installers trying to get support being told to use Galaxy & having to be persistent to get proper support. We've had posts from people not even realising that the offline installers were a thing!

GOG Galaxy *is* GOG.com, and vice-versa. It's at the point where many even refer to the Galaxy client as just "GOG" and you've done a *lot* to promote this view so don't try to claim now that it's some separate thing.

Since the very beginning GOG's biggest/most core value was DRM-freedom. You've built up your reputation on the principle that DRM is a bad thing for gamers and game preservation, that it's unethical and you've repeatedly promised to never sell anything with DRM because of this - and now here you are going back on all this by promoting and selling DRM'ed games.

You did fail to address how this is good that GOG, our preferred store, is not benefiting from exploiting people with DRM? Many of us are here not just for the games, but also because of the ethics.

Can you please explain this statement?

Let 's take an example. I own "Cinders" on GOG. I want to play it. Naturally, I want to play the latest version, which is version 1.2.7 from February 2019. If I install via Galaxy that is indeed what I get. But if I decide not to install via the "optional" Galaxy, but instead use the GOG offline installer, what I get instead is version 1.2.5a from September 2018. You had 19+ months to update the offline installer, but have not done so, obviously because what counts is what's on Galaxy. For this game, Galaxy has not been optional for 19+ months.

And, no, this is not an isolated example at all.

I'm not sure what you would be missing out on... would you have bought the game on Epic? if the answer is no, then you are not missing out of anything as you would not have bought the game to start with - and if the answer is yes, then.... you are there....

and for the rest - gOg is still going to get and sell DRM free games as usual, as I can see it, this relates to games that would not be on gOg anyway.

So how much you get from EPIC from this? Is it part of the much vaunted 12% that Sweeney so proud of or is it from the developers/publisher cut?

We have already been scammed by that promise before.

I spent some time to customise my GOG shelf, only to wake up one morning in the world where GOG had completely deleted those old game shelves without warning.

Some unfortunate people did practically speaking volunteer work for GOG by creating GOGmixes, and then they woke up one morning to find out that all GOGmixes where deleted for good, obviously without any warning.

If GOG is telling that Galaxy is a way to organise all of your games, who are they expecting to believe it anymore?
One morning when Epic has bought and integrated GOG, Galaxy and whatever "organised" things there were in it will be gone. I don't expect them to be giving a warning in advance.

Just give us DRM-free installers that we can download and locally back up, everything else is unnecessary.