Is it still doing that if you remove the infamous galaxy.dll from New Vegas' installation folder (if it's there to begin with)?

It's there. Can't start the game without it. I just reinstalled, and the galaxy.dll is still there. The installer is marked as 'Standalone'.

I have now redownloaded the offline installer from my collection on GOGs site. Installed. No change. The library is still there, I can't start the game without it and it still pushes unencrypted information over the line.

if your using windows to play your games then ur giving MS aload of telemtry stuff also, using spybot antibeacon or shutup10 can stop this dunno if it actually does or not who knows

The point being, that GOG needlessly adds to this, even unencrypted. They are effectively spying on my gaming behaviour, even when not using Galaxy (with what Galaxy does being worth another thread :) )

I wonder how many other games of GOG will happily take part in this circus, even if they are supposed to not do so.

My machines aren't usually allowed to communicate freely, regardless of operating system installed -- albeit Windows 10 really takes the cake for spying, trying to trick users into various extreme forms of giving up their data and generally being very keen on telling Microsoft, that you just moved your mouse.

It's great fun, albeit often also frustrating, to just monitor the network traffic of applications and operating systems. Or having a look at a websites source code, only to see the ludicrus stunts many, many of them pull to squeeze the very last bit of information about you out of your behaviour.

As a general note, I think our best and sadly only bet as users, who are concerned about the continous data leakage from our machines and the potential risks involved with this, is to try and get an idea of how things work and then at least try to plug the most obvious points of leakage.

Thanks for the pointer -- there are many ways to axe the line GOG is using to spy on my gaming behaviour. The fact remains, that they do, even when not using Galaxy, and relying on 'Offline Installers'.

Sending a postcard for potentially all to read about some fail in spying, instead of a sealed letter is kind of the topping of the cake.

Come on! Selling old games is not lucrative enough. They have to get some other means of income. This is totally normal and just about everyone does it.



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And it is wrong in my opinion.

yeah well u best not use a smartphone cos they track you, if your worried about tracking best thing to do is to look for guides on gpedit in windows 10 to disable the telemetry manually, also i downloaded a program called edge blocker and blocked edge browser and used gpedit to disable internet explorer which is iexplore.exe, if you dnt wanna be tracked you will have to be like me, no social media, fake info on email accounts, ofc there are things u cant avoid such as bank,energy,internet,water bills etc but u can minimise your presence online just like me

Every software which is not made to connect to the Internet in the first place should ask the user for explicit permission when it wants to make an Internet connection and should allow the user to disable these connections permanently. That of course also should be the case for games in single player mode.

Maybe there is an older version of the executables, before support for cloud saves was added, that doesn't need the spy galaxy.dll file?

how is this related to topic's theme tho? Most of windows-exclusive games can be played on linux via wine, so its not like you NEED to have win 10 (read: accept spyware as some essential evil) to play pc games in 2019
this. Even if its done for the sake of providing online achievements for games installed without galaxy, I just cant understand why cant they save these locally somewhere and upload only if user has decided to install galaxy by their own (coz, well - people mostly use standalone installers coz they DO NOT WANT all this modern-day online functionality like cheevos, cloud saves and such).

Also - isnt such type of thing against GDPR? Debug data, gaming stats or your private nsfw photos - they must ask directly until anything has been sent and describe what exactly will be collected and how it will be used, shouldnt they?

People who know how to use Wireshark :-P.

Probably just old bugged code, oh wait, is this Epic foruns?

For some games shoving unwanted online connections in isn't just annoying but performance impacting. Eg, this thread complaining about slow startup times for the GOG versions of Bioshock 1-2 (where only the "includes Galaxy achievements" GOG versions of the games takes an additional +10 seconds to open vs Steam or the non-GOG DRM-Free Classic Humble version) still appears unfixed. Literally the only difference between GOG B1 Classic (+10s to open) vs Humble DRM-Free B1 Classic (2s seconds to open) is Galaxy integration and the reason seems to be that the former seems to want to talk to something and stalls waiting for some network connection / response, even without Galaxy ever being installed.

I'd love for GOG to just offer the option of downloading offline installers of the "base" games *before* Galaxy integration is shoved in, for those of us with zero interest in Galaxy achievements / cloud saves.

it will be quite tricky to maintain multiple versions of the same game at once, so I can understand why they include galaxy.dll into standalone installers