As tricky as going into versions which are not tied to galaxy and adding that requirement? Do be aware that they are adding this to what is there. New Vegas did not come with galaxy, however now it requires it in order to function.

I have just installed a couple of other games, jazz jackrabbit collection doesn’t have galaxy.dll, nor does fallout 3. Could it be those games which had steam works on them which require galaxy.dll? Have they just replaced one with the other (as NV and bioshock both had steamworks). It would explain the why, however it’s still not good replacing one drm file with another. Will pop a support ticket in, and then if necessary compile a list of games/versions with this required dll in.

I still think it can be done for some older games that are long "finished". Eg, the Humble Store DRM-Free version of Bioshock was released years before the GOG version and hasn't needed to be updated once. Maintenance workload = zero. As nightcraw1er.488 said, all the extra work on the devs / GOG has actually gone into rewriting Steam achievements into Galaxy integration solely for GOG, not in simply uploading the "base" version that can effortlessly be reused between multiple DRM-Free stores. That's why there was a 1 month delay in getting Bioshock 1-2 Classics here after the Remasters - it was entirely down to "needing" to make a special Galaxy version just for GOG. 2K already had a "clean" DRM-Free platform neutral version ready to go - the same B1 version they uploaded to Humble and the clean B2 version that lacked the GFWL DRM that they used for the post-GFWL Steam re-release. Same version numbers, etc, literally nothing has changed at all.

But now the GOG offline installer version of the games are the slowest versions of all (even more than the online DRM'd Steam version, the Humble DRM-Free version, retail disc + NoCD version of B1, cracked Steam versions, etc) which is absurd and not what people want to hear when they buy games here specifically for a DRM-Free version. Your comment about the workload of maintaining multiple versions is valid for new games with ongoing updates, but it also works the other way when old MS-DOS / ScummVM games that have been "static" for years now "need" re-releasing purely due to Galaxy integration, ie, the "having to support two versions" is an already self-inflicted problem when Galaxy integration itself has created far more new workload for old games than the lack of it did prior to its creation.

Edit: And because Galaxy is "evolving" (evidenced by the sheer size of the offline Galaxy.dll files, eg, (2015 Galaxy.dll = 3.6MB / 2016 Galaxy64.dll = 4.6MB / 2019 Galaxy64.dll = 13.2MB), this means every so often they'll need to go back and constantly re-build & re-upload all offline installers that have outdated galaxy.dll's with new ones to avoid breaking something. That is one insane way of "reducing workload" vs not integrating it into the offline versions in the first place and simply uploading a "clean" version of "finished" games once...

There was this thread about Fallout New Vegas and possible solutions.

Unless the telemetry prevents the game from working I’m afraid it doesn’t count as DRM. I’d still like to know what it’s recording though.

Exactly that question I also have asked me. I'm not a lawyer, so I cannot answer it. But perhaps we already have given GOG the permission to do so by accepting their terms of use?

Although, at least from my understanding, all relevant parts of their Privacy Policy regarding Galaxy are prefixed with the term "If you use GOG GALAXY", which for me requires to run the Galaxy client explicitly and does not cover running a game standalone without the Galaxy client being started.

Also, doesn't the GDPR require service providers to only collect those information from a user which are needed to run the service. So if you do not want to use their service (Galaxy), GOG should not collect any information at all?

too bad there is no way to collectively address them this question. E.g like its done on bugtrackers - somebody raise the issue and others are allowed to join (instead, we can only talk with support one-by-one)

There's not even a need to maintain different versions of the games. All they need to do is to provide a dummy version of the galaxy.dll which does not phone home and distribute that dummy version with the offline installers. And when a game gets installed or updated with the Galaxy client then the client could replace this dummy version with a fully fledged galaxy.dll and all Galaxy online services would be available for the game.

I was thinking the same thing, a dummy galaxy.dll should solve these issues. Personally, I would be more than happy for GOG to just put it as a zip archive in the download section, for us, die hard offline players.

If you mean only Galaxy's telemetry, then you're partially right. But it's not irrelevant if it adds to the loading times of games.

Generally it's worse, because Unity's telemetry creates a bunch of files and folders every time you play a game (check the folders in "C:\Users\*your user*\AppData\LocalLow\" made by Unity games), so that's just useless junk that slows down the hard-drive or shortens, bit by bit, the endurance of SSDs. And was the other crap, RedShell, that would transmit telemetry even when the game was not running (or so I understood), so in that case is was irrelevant only for people who have their systems completely offline all the time, not just when playing games.


Edit: Corrected the folder's name. It's LocalLow instead of Roaming.

alot of games use unity, hearthstone does, pc builiding sim does and countless others, yesthere collecting data on you but its nothin like credit card info or personal info its just communication to galaxy for achievements and scores etc

I'm not defending telemetry at all - but given a rock or a hard place... at least the games here are DRM free.
And do you have some some scientific data to back up your claim that telemetry meaningfully shortens hard drive life span?

They could just separate the galaxy files like:

- game.exe
- gamefiles1 - 4Gb
- gamefiles2 - 3Gb
- gamefiles3galaxy - 13mb (optional)

Updating them would then be way faster for everyone.

Context.

Die hard offline players, who nonetheless have an internet connection, but don't wish to disable it every time they want to play a dang game, lest they be tracked and harvested for data.