Filed a support ticket. The combination of a more responsive GOG support (back then) + no over-reliance on Galaxy = they regularly used to provide a link to an older version of a game if there was an issue with the new one (often the same day). File a similar support ticket today and it's "Just Use Galaxy (tm)" (after a 3 week wait). So it's not like prior to Galaxy there was no way of getting a working older installer if a new one was bugged. If anything they were much more "on the ball" back then in fixing them quickly when that was the only download option.

Per DRM on GOG: list of single-player games with DRM
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/post1

King of Seas Possibly a bug, but it isn't possible to save the game without Galaxy.

Yes, I am well aware of the fact that there is a workaround for it as stated here: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/winter_sale_special_king_of_seas_giveaway_exclusive_gog_2pack_and_gog_showdown_6044c/post5

However anyone who thinks that you can't save King of Seas without Galaxy isn't wrong because this is how the game is in it's released form. Nobody should have to use a workaround to save their game.

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Galaxy required to not have the game crash at specific points was based on another thing that really did occur, except that the affected game was Cult of the Lamb. If you tried to play the game outside of Galaxy, the game wouldn't be able to verify that you owned it and would crash itself the first time you tried to summon.

Because this one was fixed, it's covered in post #2 of the DRM on GOG thread.

Hey,

Thanks .

Goodbye .

It's not entirely optional but this has been said before. Want everything for 2077 and a few other games in singleplayer? Too bad. If you don't want to use Galaxy to get the rest, that's certainly your option.

While I don't want it to ever happen, that we lose the Offline Installers, even a Galaxy download of a game is DRM-Free.

It would just mean in that Galaxy scenario, that you would be getting a DRM-Free Lite version, similar to what you can get from Steam and Epic for some of the games obtained there.

DRM-Free Lite requires a bit more work, namely backing up the game install folder, and if you want to turn it into an installer, creating a compressed file out of that folder (zip or 7z or rar etc).

You would still be better off buying your games from GOG rather than Epic or Steam for instance, because at least all single player games at GOG would be DRM-Free Lite, unlike many games at Steam or Epic. You have that guarantee.

That extra work, which most of the time I don't even bother with for DRM-Free Lite games at Steam or Epic, could well be enough to put me off buying at GOG. But I certainly wouldn't buy at other DRM based stores instead.

Long Live Offline Installers!

Oh man, those were the days. That was a long time ago but I can still feel the hurt.

This is actually a very good point. Why are older versions exclusive to Galaxy? There should be a version drop-down menu on the website.

Yeah, these sort of DRMd "bonuses" are always annoying. In the case of Witcher 3, you should be able to gain all those items with console commands and, while the same is true for Cyberpunk, implementing console is both harder and may not work with the apartment accessories. In either case, offline installer users, which includes all of Linux users, should not be forced to use console commands to gain these items. Make an offline installer (unlocker), or just have them unlocked by default.

The way I see it, nothing is ever a "bonus". All games can only add up to 100%, so the so called bonuses are content removed from the game and locked behind a paywall or some stupid hoop.

What's funny is that one of the Galaxy-DRMd items in Cyberpunk is a Katana with a description, that claims to be DRM-Free. How incredibly ironic.

Because Galaxy does not use installers and only copies files, SVM style. The functionality came with Galaxy, it acts as SVM client. Before Galaxy the functionality didn't exist at all.

Let's say version 1.0.0 has 30 files, 20GB in total A complete file list is on the server.
version 1.0.1 gets out. One file was removed, 3 added. THAT's what's stored on the server: Delete File XY and add these instead.

To do that without Galaxy, all old versions would have to be available as separated zips or generated in real time. The latter would not be possible if in addition to the zips you also wanted installers.

When getting the newest version the SVM client (in this case Galaxy) generates a complete list of the files it needs and then downloads them.

However ... basically that functionality exists for those who have enough disk space, but it only goes back to the moment when they bought the game.
If they kept the installer from that time and the patch files in between then and now, they can set the game to any version they want, starting with the one that was current when they bought the game.
An alternative would be of course to keep all installers and not just the patch files. That requires more space, but less work.

Um, no you don't.

What you call DRM-Free Lite is actually called portable. Not all DRM-free games are portable and not all portable games are DRM-free.

GOG makes absolutely no statement and certainly does not give any guarantee whatsoever that games bought here are portable. So backing up/archiving the install directory and restoring/unpacking it to a different computer might or might not work. That depends on whether the devs have designed the game to be portable or not.

What are you talking about? I'm not asking for a "Downgrade" patch to be made available.
I'm only asking for old versions of full installers to NOT be hidden, once a new version is published. If I'm downgrading, I'm willing to do a full reinstall (Uninstall current version, download and install an older version).

And we know these outdated offline installers are hidden and kept, at least for a while, because I saw a few forums posts about people asking support for older installers and support apparently did provide download links in a few cases.

So there's no need to generate anything here. There's a full offline installer for every game version from the point of release. Simply keep all of those available in the drop down menu, next to OS and language.

Indeed. Most DOS & Unity Engine games are portable but plenty of older Windows games here definitely use the registry (for the actual game and/or for some mods to 'see' where it is, not just Galaxy meta-data stored in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\GOG.com\Games). A good place to start is HKCU\Software and HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node. Required compatibility tweaks are stored in \Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers, then you have separate DirectDraw tweaks, special sdb exclusion patches for disabling ALT-TAB whilst in-game, etc.

Real-world example : delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion registry key and the "Play" and "Data Files", etc, options are greyed out in Oblivion's Launcher because the launcher looks in the registry for "Installed Path". Fallout 3 Launcher does the same thing if Bethesda Softworks\Fallout3 isn't there. Then you have Operation Flashpoint Cold War Crisis (AKA ARMA Cold War Assault) for which if you delete it's serial key (stored in the registry), you'll get this error message.

So "just copy / zip up a Galaxy-downloaded game install folder to a fresh PC at a later date and it'll be the same as a proper installer" isn't that simple for many older pre-2010 Windows games that write "game won't start without them" entries to the registry. And it's definitely important for GOG to keep the offline installers that will continue to install games offline properly in the event GOG / Galaxy ever cease to exist.

Just replace the word GOG before the word Galaxy with CDP and it no longer is so hard to see why "GOG" is pushing the client on us so much. That really was some Bizarro world logic right there, as GOG had to not just more than double the disk space they needed for their installers just to offer the current versions, but any time the client was updated, they would have had to create a new set of installers for all of their games, which makes almost certain that the upper management of the CDP Group only started to listen to reason once expanding GOG storage capacity started to cost them too much.

Only a small fraction of the games I have bought from here have ever gotten installed and even less have been played extensively afterwards, so once I eventually end up wanting to play this or that game, I want to be able to install the latest version that is compatible with whatever OS the game was claimed to work with when it was sold to me, so it would be nice if GOG would understand to add them as unsupported extras whenever a later update breaks existing OS compatibility, as then I would only need to run a download script once a month or even less often and perhaps even set it to keep all the extras while moving older installers from the installer folders to a common temp folder where I could then quickly delete them whenever I am about to run out of disk space.

Or I can of course stop buying more games and waste my gaming budget on multiple 20 TB HDDs in order to allow me to have some time to actually play my games rather than test each update for them one by one...

One could argue that the amount of keys some games have might be a reason to not make them portable, for example I never finished Chrome as it simply had so many keys that I refused to ever again bloat any of my other systems with them.

While you would be technically correct, I would not use a closed-source application to download games, even if they actually finally released a Linux version. This is why I never use(d) Steam, even for "DRM-free" games. At least in gog's case, though, someone has reverse engineered the download process, available in the form of lgogdownloader (there may be more), so it doesn't bother me too much. Trouble with reverse engineered solutions, of course, is that they may be incomplete and the server protocol may change any time without notice or regret. Look at the rapid release cycles of e.g. youtube downloaders as well as Steam's silent modification of "non-steam" mod downloads combined with a mass shutdown of login-style downloaders for why that will not work out in the long run.

If Galaxy wasn't bloated and was just a downloader I would probably have used it, just like I happily used the old GOG Downloader.

It wouldn't bother me if it is closed source, so long as it does the job it is supposed to and well. I say that as someone who crafts my own programs or creates GUI front-ends for the likes of gogcli.exe or gogrepo.py, both of which might as well be closed source for all I can understand them outside of their command-line usage.

But GOG never replaced the old GOG Downloader with something sensible, so I had to turn to gogrepo.py and then later gogcli.exe, and because I was going to all that trouble and having to use the command-line, I developed GUIs to bend things more to my liking. So aside from resume, I now have a much better downloader for GOG games anyway.

Aside from any lack of command-line usage, I cannot see what issue there is with a downloader that is closed source. It is a scenario that is not much different to the inner workings of a DVD player or something similar, where we are for the most part unable to alter much.

A program that downloads GOG games (Offline Installers) is just a means to an end, and if you are using GOG properly, you download once, backup, and never need to do so again, except for any patches or updates. Even your browser is okay to use, if you don't mind all the extra clicking on download links, etc. You can claim that most browsers are open source, but as far as modifying them to do something different with your downloads, which I have yet to see anyone do, they might as well be closed source.