I makes perfect sense. I don't need an internet connection to play my games.

Again:
Some people have no, or only a shitty (slow, limited) internet connection at home.

Those people can still download their games in some other place: In a library, at work, university, in a public place to thumbdrive, or even via smartphone and wifi (maybe not the 100 GB of CP2077...) and then transfer the installers to their machine at home.
They can't however install Galaxy on computer in a library, at work or a public place, and they can't install it on their smartphone.

When I had moved I actually downloaded my games at work and carried them home for a few months, until I got a decent internet connection. If Galaxy had been the only option to do that I would have been really pissed at GOG.

The device where I download is not necessarily the device where I play my games. The device where I download might not be compatible with Galaxy, or it isn't even mine. Every internet-enabled device has a browser, that's the lowest common denominator. So downloading through a browser should always work. Galaxy is a (nice) tool for convenience and it must always stay this way. "Will always be optional" is also what GOG promised.

GOOD NEWS

No, there is just dumb code (no AI whatsoever) :). It can not possibly know of branches in offline files, so it checks the latest published version (which in this case is probably the stable one). Thanks for letting me know, I will add a manual exception in this case.

No, it does not take patches into account, that is very true. Thanks for flagging this particular game. If you're aware of other games where this is an issue, do let me know please.

There is no "just below" in the APIs :). While I could implement this in theory, it would open a whole new can of worms and exceptions that have to be treated, so I'd rather not.

I'm not NASA, but I do what I can (it has gotten a lot better lately)... Probably GOG should implement a system of consistent versioning, eh?

Many thanks, as always, mrkgnao ;).

P.S. Kind reminder that I only get time to update the list over weekends, so it may very well lag behind reality in some cases. Think of it as the image of the Sun you see in the sky (it is 8 minutes "late" :).

Except, of course, that the image of the sun tends to be more up to date than the image of the galaxy...

It says generated, not uploaded/released. My guess is that someone at GOG has to check if everything went through correctly and confirm/retest the final release, which I think is where the delays/omissions arise.

Considering that this list is, right now, the bible for some boycotters as an example of how outdated the offline installers are, I think that discovering that the patches and other possible exceptions are not taken in account is pretty important.

I don't know how many offline installers are outdated in GOG but I can't neither be sure of the number in this list.

I am sure you are doing what you can. But apparently these discrepancies weren't important for some people until now.

I hope you understand what I am trying to explain.

greetings

That was going to be my next question depending on answer: if it can be automated for Galaxy but it's not automated for offline installers, then what's the problem with those?

*Sigh* Yeah, no worries, I get it. It's just that I keep repeating that is a known limitation, but nobody seems to be aware of it... it should not be something "just being discovered". I'll see if I can add a note regarding it somehow on Airspace.

I have automated means of excluding a plethora of false positives, so the list should be pretty accurate outside of some corner cases, which I can manually exclude when people bring them to my attention. It is code generated based on the data extracted from GOG APIs - can't get any more accurate than this, unless GOG hires me and gives me direct access to their systems.

P.S.: I'd also like to mention I'm not a boycotter (at least not yet), so I don't really have a horse in the race. I'm just looking at the data and strive for accuracy for accuracy's sake.

No idea. But the fact that a human input is required somewhere in the process when it comes to offline installers is most likely behind the delays and cases of long outdated games. We can but speculate about how their internal processes are set up and I doubt they will share anything.

I am absolutely willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and just assume that there simply are cases where updates have slipped through the cracks, the person who was supposed to do it had a vacation or a notification about a new build didn't go off or one of a thousand other things that could happen which led to this.

But they should definitely regularly check the list that has been linked in this thread and use the help of the community to keep everything up to date. Also (correct me if I'm wrong), I think that some updates only change stuff relevant for the Galaxy install so that could be behind some discrepancies as well. The Galaxy version gets bumped above the offline but in result, they are still both the same, sans the version number.

Can confirm that we're mostly "back to normal" now, at least in terms of the number of total detected discrepancies, after an interval when it was significantly worse, and my now notorious list had grown up to about 150 entries.

On a scale of...

Ah that makes sense, fair enough (I initially didn't understand that you were downloading the installers from a different computer than the one you install the games on). Although if they made Galaxy portable such that you don't have to "install" it to run it, then this wouldn't be an issue. That said, I do still agree with you that it would be inconvenient to have to download and run Galaxy just to download our games. It would be better if they still keep it optional and offer downloads to offline installers via the website.

Focusing on Galaxy and removing offline installers are two different things. I would be very angry about the latter, and GOG have promised not to do it, so let's hope they keep their word.

No idea what you mean. I already wrote in the OP that its mentioned on page 4. (And its part of CDP not CDPR.) And obviously somebody needs to do the stuff required for GOG Galaxy. And obviously this is going to be the GOG part and not other parts. So it obviously makes sense to mention the GOG part (I mean the company subdivision which page 4 is about) there. The issue is that nothing on page 4 (or anywhere else in there) even mentions anything about offline, standalone or DRM-free. Its that which they dont mention which this topic is about. For example somebody knowing nothing about GOG and knowing Steam reads this document: It would give them the impression that GOG is like Steam and all (officially supported) gaming goes through the "GOG Galaxy" client. As this document basically describes their promoted vision for the future of CDP (for potential and existing shareholders - some may know very little about GOG especially as it doesnt contribute much profit) I think its fair to ask that question.

Gog will always be a non-drm platform because that is its differential element.

You can have Non-DRM games and an optional client that you have many other options (profiles, achievements ...).

The latter is what most users want, to be able to choose what they like the most. But there are a few users who want to impose their ideas on the rest and as you can read on different social networks they have failed.

I don't like galaxy, I don't use it, but it seems perfect for anyone who wants achievements, profiles or other options to use it.