The offline installer gives you an .exe file that skips the RED launcher. The RED launcher is not required to play the game.

This is being overblown imo. It's not even a real launcher like Steam or Epic. It's a play button with some CDPR games/dlc advertised in the background. You can still play offline or ignore the launcher altogether.

So for offline installers will the default desktop shortcut bypass the RED launcher, or do we need to take the extra step of creating our own shortcut which points directly to the .exe file in order to avoid the RED launcher ? I seem to remember that Paradox also did this with their launcher for Prison Architect. It is annoying when there is no clear information regarding little pieces of trickery like this.

And which version of Cyberpunk 2077 is this ? When I later look at my multiple backups I would like to know which one requires this extra step so I can leave myself a note.

Anyway, thanks for the reply.

The default shortcut goes through the launcher. I can agree it isn't great that the launcher shortcut is the default without an option to go through the .exe when first installing.

Not sure which version started this.

Okay, thank you kindly. I would not have been prepared for this otherwise. I’ll make my own shortcuts for all the post-Phantom Liberty versions.

The Galaxy client downloads offline installers if you tell it to. Clients are not inherently DRM no matter how much you stomp your feet and insist they are.

And of course there is also offline DRM, SecuROM and SafeDisc being two older examples, so I guess the “essence” of DRM-freeness is not strictly offlineness - though ultimately I want to be able to play my games offline without interference is my point.

Ironically, I would probably welcome certain of those primitive forms of “disk check” DRM back just so that I could get certain older games running again, e.g. my original copy of Rome : Total War. As long as it isn’t going to do harm to my computer. I don’t mind using an external optical drive for those, but I can’t play those games without a crack nowadays. However, the days of physical media are over.

I still cannot see any point in using a client, however. I am absolutely fine with downloading my games via a browser. All the extra “features” offered by clients are to my mind just pointless fluff, and as far as I know (I’ve never used one) they all require an internet connection - which is exactly what I want to avoid when I’m gaming.

How stupid this DRM thing can be. Once I had a game, don't remember the name, that was so bad, that I ragequited and threw the CD against the wall, so angry did it make me. Then I wanted to deinstall it, but I wasn't allowed to deinstall it, because the deinstaller required the original CD in the drive. WTF?
I'm nearly sure now, that the developers knew how bad their game was and how the reaction of the gamers would be and that they wanted to give the buyers of it a last kick in the ass.

Fixed.
Aha! Marketing motivation identified and quid pro quo confirmed.
And, second data point confirms it is a marketing idea.
But as an intrusive mechanism to ensure accurate marketing data for the bean counters ("Look how many people registered to obtain the (naff) online 1007z!!!1!") it is efficient, economical (externalizing any immediate costs to the customer/player) and simple to apply. The principal-agent problem means those responsible will only generate confirmation whilst those whom it annoys have little opportunity for (direct) feedback. (This topic being one of the few counter examples.)

Based on the success (the ratio number of mooks using the launcher against total sales) they can simultaneously see how many people are willing to pay this (small, salami-slice) price for some horse armour and thus calculate a quantified estimate of the residual opposition to DRM that exists even in a vocally anti-DRM community, like Gog.

What might help prevent others from this behaviour would be if a gamedec™ investigated who the guilty parties are and doxxed them. (Not that I would ever endorse illegal activity.) :-"
This is technically correct but it is a process to measure the customer base. Telemetry is the first, necessary step in order to control behaviours. (Cue paranoia about subliminal political control.)
Zuboff calls this Instrumentarianism. In other words, digital predictive products are created from the behavioural surplus data that was scraped from consumers, so as to automate the public, cōnfer MJ Radin digital corporate eminent domain.

[Shoshana Zuboff (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Introduction, p.8f.; Margaret Jane Radin (Princeton, 2012), Boilerplate: the Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, & the Rule of Law, p.14.]
What is concerning is that there seems to be no force preventing this creeping into more and more services, which now includes gaming.

I know the topic is RedLauncher, but there is an additional negative component of Galaxy that no one has mentioned. Yes, it might be good as a downloader....maybe even as a launcher if you dig that sort of thing, but for some of the games here there is no such thing as offline with Galaxy installed (yes, single player titles). Take Blazing Chrome for instance, you can install it with offline installers and it plays just fine. However, Galaxy is intimately tied to their leaderboards and to the unlocking of their in-game achievements.....and as such has galaxy components installed via the offline installers. If you just happen to install Galaxy at a later date or time, you can never play this game offline because it automatically uses the installed Galaxy components in it's own subfolder to connect anyway. This is regardless of whether Galaxy is offline or online. It also overwrites your local saves. I'm sure there are more examples, but This is a prime example of how terrible Galaxy is and can be.

As do every other GOG game that hasn't somehow still managed to evade being made installable through the client, as it makes no sense from GOG's support staff's point of view for there being any differences between the contents of two installation folders of the same game/version just because one was installed directly from the client and the other from the offline installers.

I wouldn't mind there being an option in the client to enable/disable all data gathering per each game, but until then, one either has to forego without the client entirely, or accept that some usage data could be relayed through the client from any GOG game even if a game's own executable is not allowed to go online.

How can the client overwrite local saves unless one has already made the mistake of allowing it to sync saves to the cloud in the first place?

I can't answer any of your questions, guy. I don't work for GOG. However, it does exactly as i say it does.

I asked only one question and it was about save files getting overwritten, which doesn't seem to talked about at all in the link you provided.

Developers figuring out how to use the Galaxy-API in a way that we don't like it to be used is nothing new, unfortunately GOG clearly isn't doing even the bare minimum of tests needed to verify that none of such issues affect any game or its later patches before we are given the chance to install them.