I'd like to get some actual numbers, though. Frankly, galaxy has been getting more and more pushy. It wasn't until the galaxy default installers being pushed upon us that i got vocal myself about galaxy. Until that happened, it didn't appear to me that gog was really going the way of DRM. I might've complained before that about all the galaxy advertisments, but I didn't feel threatened until gog started sneaking galaxy onto my computer. It's like "we know you haven't been downloading this, so we're going to give it to you anyway, so here you go, enjoy, and if you don't, too bad."

That's bullshit and you know it's bullshit. It's the implementation that's the issue, not the client.

If you can't be honest about that, you're incapable of engaging in reasoned discussion.

I never said it wasn't. I was talking in general about Galaxy related post... not specifically about bundled Galaxy installers. I have always been against that.

Well only GOG has the numbers... so it hard to say. They did release a graph showing that Galaxy usage increased a lot in 2017, but it didn't have overall numbers. We do know that, according to GOG, nearly 700K people played Witcher 3 via Galaxy... so even if a fraction of those users became casual GOG users that is a lot of people using Galaxy.

And there's the big issue: We also don't know how those numbers came to be. Did that include the ones who had galaxy snuck onto their computer (most likely)? Does that also include the galaxy that is included in the standalone installers that don't include the galaxy client?

This was before all of that... Witcher 3 released a long time ago. They did provide Galaxy with phyical copies, but digital sales should be a lot higher that physical, so those users should be small.

I don't know about the digital sales thing. America, for example, is still fairly worried about digital distributions. I can imagine people buying it at Walmart and just going with it and using whatever default setup exists.

It's honestly one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. It has negative functionality with no benefits. Even Desura was just basic but useful.

On console physical sales are still the majority, but on PC digital became the number one way of buying games a long time ago with the rise of Steam.

https://gamerant.com/pc-digital-physical-sales-comparison-2013/

Where do physical copies with mandatory steam downloads land? I remember quite a few people complaining that they bought a physical DVD only to have it only include steam itself and a key for the steam edition of the game.

No idea... but I'm sure that would still fall under a physical sale by those who track that data.

Depends on how they track that data. The easiest way to track the data would require self-reporting from user (unlikely) or self-reporting from steam (very likely). And i'm willing to bet steam is not going to separate online purchases vs online key redeems. So, just for example, the majority of games were sold as steam versions on disk (like Skyrim), they'll count as both physical and digital copies, and then 2 or 3 people bought online exclusively, it'd look like a 50-50 split with slight majority of people leaning towards digital. Now, if you look at things from a realistic perspective, and knowing that with all the talk of piracy back then, i'm willing to bet the steam key redeems became fashion back then. I wouldn't know for sure, though, since I was too busy playing my old copies of older games with my sub-par computer and focusing on console titles otherwise.

EDIT: And wasn't that about the time of minecraft as well?

I'm pretty sure they do.. I remember some games I bought physical that came with Steam were listed as retail key in Steam. I'm not going to debate it though, according all availble public information which you can Google the vast majority of PC sales are digital. So I'll leave it to you to look it all up. :P

Given studies and stats are usually biased in a "follow the money" fashion, i am a little geared towards questioning everything.