yep....goodbye Steam...at least i own my games now,nice to see more games coming over to GOG,plus I don't pay an Interational transaction fee

I'd be using the downloader, except it has a tendency to get unrecoverable checksum errors, or did the last time I tried. Galaxy sucks for me. Slow to start up, slow to shut down, and hogs my (extremely limited) bandwidth like nothing else. Even when I'm not downloading, it often makes my connection unuseable. I can set it to half my bandwidth and still see it hogging every KB/s I have in the task manager. It's also more CPU-heavy than Steam. About the only thing I want it for is achievements, but not many devs bother with them. Even for new games that have achievs on Steam. Well, at least there's cloud saving.

I consider lack of achievements a benefit. Achievements "direct" your gameplay in weird, often degenerate, ways instead of just letting you experience and enjoy the game on your terms.

Only if you care about them. And if you care about them, you're probably fine having your gameplay 'directed'...

I just realized I use steam and battle.net but I refuse to use Galaxy. I have some serious mental issues! XD

I'm quite the same, at least with Steam currently. It's the new sane now ;)

A tad belated - sorry if it sounded like I misinterpreted what you said. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have quoted you, it's just that your comment, followed by BKGaming's one, gave me the opportunity to point out the reasons GOG has given for why they're doing certain things the way they're doing them regarding the website library and standalone installers, and none of them is a technical one.

Wait... they have reasons? Sometimes I think much of this stuff comes down to a drunken version of pin-the-tail-on-the-website-design. ; )

'I don't think so, Tim.' ;P

'The difference between gremlins and goblins - what do they do?'

Heh, perhaps that's why the reasons they give us are what they are?

Tried it twice. Uninstalled afterwards. I don't like having to reinstall games because my uninstalls is missing from program and features. Have to go to each folder to uninstall/reinstall to get it back for convenience. Not installing again ever.

I'm sure there ARE valid reasons for these matters, but they're not required to share them with us.

I like to gripe, but the important parts of the store - buying and getting the games - work fine except for the odd glitch. But sure, I'd love to see continuing site access to all the game updates over the years. Really, that's my only valid complaint. That, and the odd security flaw that people find every once in a blue moon.

This is getting too far into semantic minutiae territory for me, no offense. As long as GOG provides a way to install and play your games on a new system without contacting a server they have lived up to their promise, IMO.

Ok, so now it is clear what you expect from them. I have already seen that for many others the idea that we would have to download our GOG game installers with Galaxy (no option to use a web browser instead) is breaking the promise of a client (Galaxy) being optional.

I guess their thinking is that Galaxy being optional means they never have to install nor use Galaxy, even for downloading the standalone offline installers. While I can understand that argument, I personally still would be fine with an official client that you need to use for downloads, as long as it does its job well. If I understood you right, you would be fine with such an approach as well (Galaxy required to download the offline installers), or at least you'd feel GOG hasn't broken its promise of the client being optional then.

The next step from that would be like how the DRM-free games in Steam are handled, ie. you have to download and install the game once with the client (Steam)... but after that you can zip the installed game files to make a compressed package that you can copy to another PC and play there even without the Steam client (maybe needing to install dependencies like DirectX9 or Visual C++ 2005 separately, as they wouldn't be included in those zip files). Would people still consider Galaxy optional, if it required one to download the game files and install them the first time, but after that they could use those game files independently? For those who feel "Galaxy is optional" means "I never have to even touch Galaxy, ever", I guess not.