It doesn't affect every game but that's also not what anyone claimed either. It doesn't affect pre-2018 releases nor games that don't use Galaxy achievements because the wrapper is only needed for those. It does affect quite a lot of major post-2018 releases (Dishonored, Bioshock Remasters) and a lot of other same-timeframe Indie releases. I don't know why people can't discuss a subject like grown-ups on this forum without putting words into others mouths for the sake of attempted ridicule at "daring" to suggest GOG fix their bugs, but here we are...

This x1000000. Those with 10 year old GOG accounts and +1000 games put up with a hell of a lot of "GOG problems" mostly out of habituation. Look at it from the perspective of a newcomer though - "Yeah that non-Steam PC game store you recommended the other day? Their Client is flaky, forums are creaky, reviews uneditable, CDN / download speeds randomly plummet, website is slow to load, some games are outdated, others are leaving the store in droves, and their offline installer games take longer to start offline without DRM than Steam games do including an online DRM check because it turns out they're just selling Steam versions of some games anyway, but ones that GOG have badly modified so that they end up looking & behaving almost exactly like bad pirated versions that contain malware mining scripts... Overall, I'm not that convinced I should start building a large collection there today and will stick with Steam thanks..." is a literal conversation I had after recommending GOG to someone last year.

"But, but, this x issue is so minor just like a, b, c, are and I Syphon72 don't care about anything at all"! They may not matter to you Syphon as individual issues, but combined as a whole first impressions DO count to newcomers. And that's GOG's real problem - they've been hyper-aggressive on pushing Galaxy for 10 straight years now and people still aren't coming here in meaningful numbers, so it's clear "lack of client" isn't the issue. What is then? Low conversion, ie, a stream of "one-game accounts" where people sign up to GOG mostly for CDPR games (Witcher 3 & Cyberpunk) then due to a permanent state of "chronic flakiness" where years old problems never get fixed, they end up drifting back to Steam without staying around long. After yet another profit warning and yet another whopping 20% workforce layoff last quarter, GOG need to get serious this year, stop messing around in a state of perma-complacency now and start actually fixing this stuff, issue by issue. These bugged Galaxy wrappers, CDN speeds that drop to kilobytes for some regions, etc, need solutions not excuses, because doing nothing and letting everything rot into mediocrity is definitely not enticing newcomer / non-regulars to want to stick around here and start building a decade worth large collection of GOG games during 2025-2035 (the same way many here built theirs during 2010-2020) regardless of how sky high your "personal flakiness threshold" here may be.

I was just testing Bioshock Remastered 1+2, and Dishonored. Those rather demanding games are startíng up pretty quick for me... i can not detect any suspicious or unusual startup delay. I dare to say, it will not startup quicker than this on Steam... and yes, i got several aswell demanding DRM free Steam games for comparison and they behave more or less equal (DRM free ones... mind it).

It feels like, sometimes, people simply not willing to adapt to something else will find endless issues in order to validate "this is wrong to them". I could as well find a huge list of reasons why not to use Steam... there is not a single perfect platform (nor perfect human) out there as soon as someone is in a critical way looking out for issues linked to it.

I think, instead of trying to find endless "confounding factors", in which any good will is destroyed already near beyond restoration, it is more advisable to find some "values" or big things truly important to someone. For me it is clearly... the ownership and ultimately a DRM free condition and as well a company that is not as greedy as a black hole, instead trying to challenge "the mighty forces, trying to dominate everything". There are some other important values, but those values are already a major step for me. Many of the "little things" feels more like a pretended reason in order for not having to deal with it, instead of a "true reason, comparable to a dark red flag".

People have measured it dude myself included, in game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game ]... A GOG developer then responded confirming the bug but only half fixing for new games. If you don't care personally, fair enough, but stop gaslighting and trying to make others out to liars over what GOG have already confirmed themselves to be true.

Sometimes it also feels like what ListyG wrote in the 2nd paragraph of her post above is correct, ie, the same half dozen people here have developed some very weird unhealthy cult of mediocrity where any attempt to fix any problem with GOG in any way is met with troll-like gaslighting by those who seem to actually want the service here to become as intentionally bad as possible. Utterly bizarre beyond belief that such a simple "Hey can you fix that 6 year old bug please" is much with such irrational hostility...

I was just testing it using a internet stopwatch... from "clicking my EXE to the 2K logo", it was less than 20 sec until my stopwatch window disappeared because of the 2k logo and ingame screen. However... the menu will come almost instantly after, so this is basically the entire startup-time.

I dunno how fast it is on Steam... but if it looks way better there it should be like 10 seconds, which is kinda hard to believe on this game, but who knows. Surely it is not even half of the claimed time for me... so either my game is different or my system.

I was able to watch the stopwatch up to around 17-18 secs, until ingame-switch to the 2k logo, so this is a huge difference.

Of course, Horizon Forbidden West (EGS DRM free) or Horizon Zero Dawn (GOG) will startup almost instantly, because so extremely well optimized from talented devs... so indeed a lot faster load up time is possible, yet... in general, anything below 20 sec is no hassle to me and about "what have to be expected for many games".

The only reason Horizon Zero Dawn still takes a couple of secs is because the intro logos can not be canceled, on Horizon Forbidden West (the record holder of the fastest startup of any modern game and basically the milestone of what is possible) it is nearly instant. Again, this is not the "usual case"... those devs are just very special.

The point is GOG's DRM-Free games startup slower (depending on the 'weight' of a game, sometimes up to 15x slower) than the DRM'd Steam versions due to hanging for a network check in OFFLINE installers shouldn't be happening at all, ie, paying GOG customers using offline installers shouldn't be getting a worse performing version than what people pirating Steam versions get for free, and plenty of above examples are shown by comparing the two builds side by side on the same hardware.

The point is not a "I timed starting a game on my $4000 Ryzen 9800X3D + RTX 4090 PC Master Race e-peen build then didn't compare it to anything but I'm sure it starts up faster than your $1,500 PC so suck it, PCMR FTW!" thing...

Please give me a good comparison on a modern system with both versions... just so i can verify it is a true issue instead of a... rather exaggerated issue. In my mind, if it does exceed 10+ sec vs. another version, it would be a true issue. But personally even 5+ sec is already the limit, because i am demanding.

Show me just one single game, or even more (so i may at least own it and able to test it), that is 15 times slower or at least 10 times slower vs. Steam version!

Besides... i am not allowed to link directly to Steam... but this is a post from a User of the Steam version. He obviously is not owning a Master Race PC, but at least he should own the Steam version which is 10 times or whatever... faster than the GOG version.

:D [has BioShock Remastered] 15 Sep, 2018 @ 10:59am
"""Game loading too long
When I start the game it's loading time about 1-3 minutes, and it's very strange, it's located on ssd.
I tried to google it and there few people who got this problem too, but there was no solution to this.""""

I did exactly that yesterday with The Castle, ie, GOG version with 2x wrappers = 15.5s startup times vs 0.5s other stores (or if you replace the GOG .dll with Goldberg). It has zero do with hardware performance, SSD read speed, etc, the issue is a network timeout (game hangs waiting for Galaxy) that shouldn't be in offline installers.

Personally I don't care what your or Syphon76's "feelings" are towards those reporting it. Such platform bugs should be fixed anyway for both the same reason other Galaxy bugs need fixing plus it looks ridiculously unprofessional for middlemen to start adding bugs in other people's games then just leave them in there for 6 years...

Unfortunately i do not own this game, so i am unable to test. What can be said for sure, it is a pretty unique case and it is not a loading... but a GOG (Galaxy) API issue. GOG simply will have to fix it.

The thing you did was simply to avoid and replace the "non responding GOG API with the Steam API", and the Steam API is basically just emulated so Goldberg will give the game a instant "green light". It is probably not even that fast on Steam, yet i totally agree... the GOG API is a failure here and they SHOULD (in fat letters) fix it.

You're right it is a Galaxy API issue (but not unique to that game), and that's all we've been politely asking for to be fixed above, only to have others jump down our throats...

The funny part is that i even noticed that some Steam games with Denuvo DRM still start faster than "DRM-free" Ghost wrapper GOG versions... Deus Ex Mankind Divided takes 10 seconds to start on the Steam version with 8 seconds of that time doing the Denuvo DRM check... And this is a game someone noticed took forever for the DRM-free GOG offline installer version to startup because of the Ghost wrapper... even though Denuvo DRM is infamous for long startup/loading times and performance problems... I also noticed the Steam version of Bioshock games also start fast including Bioshock Infinite which still has CEG...

I tested the Deus Ex and Bioshock games on a GTX 1060 Ryzen 5 2600x PC with 16GB RAM and a NVMe SSD. Note: I don't own the Deus Ex and Bioshock games on GOG.

Bioshock Remastered is not even on my fastest drive i just investigated... it is on my 990 Pro°° (which is the only SSD for unknown reason running hot, at least if the temp sensor is not faulty... i dunno). It is probably less than 15 secs if put on the T700, so personally i can not moan.

°°Launch model... i generally do not recommend getting launch stuff from Samsung, it is plagued by issues and at the same time twice that expensive.

Indeed. The lighter weight the game the more obvious it becomes. Eg, if a game takes 20s to start then +15s is "only" +75% longer. On the other hand to use AB2012's example from yesterday, lightweight games that (should) startup near instantly it's like 0.5s vs 15.5s (a +3000% increase) at which point the GOG versions feel like they're seriously broken / people even start to question if they have malware in them when another store's Denuvo'd 50GB AAA's with 2x online DRM checks still start faster than a 70MB Adventure Studio Engine game, which certainly isn't the best advert for GOG's offline installers...

DRM-Free should ultimately be showcasing the opposite, ie, "Your Syberia 3 Denuvo version starts in 45s? Well the GOG offline installer starts in 15s". Not 'Ghost Wrapper' = "We have Steam at home but with more bugs!"

I can not say what the game is "doing"; so those stuff is pure guessing here.

What is clear, according to my tests: The game got a small startup launcher, and booting into this launcher it takes about 13 sec (using stopwatch, up to the point it will pop up) on the GOG version for me. Booting from the launcher to the ingame menu, by canceling the logos... it just takes a couple of more seconds... on the GOG version, so it is probably not much more than 15 sec for me, into the game menu. You have to use the gamepad, mind it... the KB will not work for canceling it. As well not on my fastest drive...

However... mind it: This game, if the cache files has been wiped OR if the GPU driver (sometimes even after an OS update) has been updated... is compiling shaders, and this process can take up to a minute on absolutely any system. If this is done so... usually any follow up-startup goes very fast (compared to the ugly stuff people say), according to my tests.

I never said those games got the fastest or even a fast bootup time but it is surely not disturbing on any performant system... as i generally say below 5 sec is "world record", below 10 sec "super fast", below 15 sec is "still fast", and below 20 sec is "average or simply normal". Above 20 sec is a "slow" start for me.. but i actually can not say which game is that slow for me... yet perhaps such a game may exist. Always from EXE to ingame menu.