And that definitely proves my point. A lot of Devs do a minimal amount of work for the Gog version, so expecting them to dynamically load the Galaxy DLL and make sure their game run without it so that one or two Gog users can run the game on Windows 3.1 is hardcore dreaming.
We go back to the good old "Everything I don't like is a DRM" but that's not how it works. The fact that a game is not working on an unsupported OS, regardless of the reason, is not a DRM.

I think the main point actually flew over your head, and you seem to have it back to front again. It's games that don't have achievements, etc, that ironically have the highest backward compatibility. And with few exceptions, the bulk of old game mainstream compatibility actually comes from big 3rd party open source modding community projects (eg, DOSBox, ScummVM, dgVoodoo, etc) and GOG's internal support team merely incorporate that. And all these projects also seem to have a significantly more positive attitude towards both backwards & forwards compatibility than Galaxified offline installers suffering from dependency creep.

Eg, for GZDoom, choose your version or have the option of LZDoom. For ScummVM, choose your version or have over 15 platforms supported including even special builds for W95, XP, etc. This is not abnormal across the old game preservation modding industry (outside of the Galaxy First bubble). Aside from respecting that far more than I do some of the "attitudes" here, the only real takeaway from your posts is that if you want the maximum possible forwards & backwards compatible version, "don't buy the GOG version, just source a client-less version elsewhere and patch it yourself"? That's not a particularly great sounding advert you have there...

And as I answered you, in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter at all; You have a lot more peoples who cares about multiplayer, achievements, cloud save, auto-updates, etc... than you have peoples who wants to runs games on their long dead original OSes.

And Gog and most other stores have always been about having games run on the latest OS (or at least the one with the biggest market share). So when the choice is between adding new feature that a majority wants, while still keeping the game DRM-free, or not doing it because a couple of peoples might want to have said games continue running on their original OSes, then it's perfectly logical that Gog chose the former and it is silly to expect them to do otherwise.

Backward compatibility with older/original OS has never been an objective for Gog or most other online store for that matter, only compatibility with newer OSes, also , a majority of peoples wants achivements, cloud save,

The takeaway is if you want maximum possible forwards and backwards compatibility don't buy from a shop that, since the beginning, is all about forward compatibility and never cared at all about keeping backward compatibility.

I do think that it would be important to have some "libraries" that keep a a bit for bit original copies of games for historical and preservation purpose, would it be great if Gog provided this "feature" (as in possibility to download the unaltered original binaries of the game), yes of course, but it never was something they ever promised or said they would do.

That features vs compatibility choice is a "false dilemma" though as even with Galaxy features for Galaxy users, there's never been any reason to put Galaxy features inside offline installers that can't even use them, only to then have to create a wrapper that allows them to fail safely, then need to constantly update that wrapper. A literal "Rube Goldberg" implementation. There's games in my collection now (eg, Giants Citizen Kabuto, Grey Matter, etc) that still have the several years old installers based on the old 2.0.0.x naming system because no galaxy.dll code in it (that exists solely to cancel out achievements placed in offline installers that offline installer users can't use anyway) vs simply not putting them there at all...) meant there's no need to spend time updating them. "Galaxified" installers OTOH, have needed regular updates (not for the game but the Galaxy wrappers).

There's been an insane waste of resources over the past 6 years in that area. Almost as much "Make Work" as those special "g" suffixed installers a few years back when GOG went through the whole catalogue adding Galaxy installer stubs inside the offline installers, only to have to go back and remove them all again due to the backlash. I'm often left wondering how much better the store could have been had the time wasted on that instead been spent finding just one experienced web developer and then upgrading the store with features people actually want (editable reviews, better forum software, bringing back GOG mixes, etc), as with GOG's ongoing profit warnings, I'm seriously questioning whether the significantly higher maintenance of over-complicated offline installers has actually been justified by increased sales for those features you claim the "majority" want but never seem to bring any money in...

No, I already answered that; Not including the Galaxy DLL in the offline installer would means that devs would need to either dynamically load the DLL (which would be the most elegant) or create two different version of the executable.

And both solution would require more work, on the devs side, that most of them are not going to do for the Gog version. And even for Devs ready for it I would guess it would only worsen the version alignment between the Galaxy and the offline installer version.

Not sure what you are trying to say here. The Galaxy DLL is only there if the code actually support it, it's not in Grey Matter, Giants, etc... because nobody touched their codes for decades and nobody every implemented any features (achievements, etc... ) requiring it. The Galaxy DLL is not some dark magic that somehow "wrap" games just by being there, it need to be loaded and used in the code itself.

Stuff like that works both ways. It's possible that GOG has a lost a sale from lack of cloud saves but for me the opposite has happened. eg, there's been some DOS games here that I own on disc but thought about "double dipping" but then cloud saves were added to DOSBox, and I've been left thinking "If I have to extract the DOS files and put them in a normal central DOSBox install to get rid of the stupid cloud_saves folder, (or worse if GOG deleted all the .EXE's and is ScummVM only whilst my disc version can work under both), then remind me why should I buy a more annoying / less functional version of this game again vs just using the discs I already own, zipping that up and calling that my 'installer'?" And so GOG has lost a few DOS sales there from me "the other way around". Now if people like me are genuinely outnumbered 50:1 by those who refuse to buy GOG games unless there's achievements, etc, in every game (as you seem to suggest), then why do GOG's profits seem to go down the harder they push it?...

We all get that GOG "is about old games on new OS's, not old games on old OS's", but at the same time I think it's self evident those offline installers should never end up more annoying / less compatible than zip files of same games hosted for free by "Abandonware" sites, for pretty obvious common sense reasons...

Why would you need to do that ? if you don't use Galaxy the whole "cloud save" are not used. And even if you use Galaxy you can disable them. (Not to mention that even if you happen to use them you can download the saves to use them offline).

Probably because those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Or if you want to go that way : DotEmu released games without any client or achievements and they die and not Gog, following your logic that would mean that they failed because of the lack of achievements...

And they are not for 99.9999% of users of the offline installers who will never ever notice whenever the Galaxy dll (or the Steam one, or even the Securom one) is present or not.

The main purpose for Gog is to be convenient for the majority of users, everybody could download a ZIP from an abandon ware and spend X times tweaking dosbox to make it work, and probably work better than Gog version, but very few peoples actually want to do it, most prefer to simply double click on a icon and have the game launch and works, that's for them, and for peoples wanting a legal version, that Gog exists.

If all you want is a ZIP files containing the original unaltered files of the game then Gog is probably not for you, you are probably better off buying the original CD from e-bay.

GOG did it because people wanted it. People were upset about lack of feature parity between Steam and GOG. Some devs refused to release here without the ability to add some of these features. It's not like GOG out of the blue decided to do this to torment their oldest customers.

There is no increased workload, the same installers works with or without Galaxy, that's the main reason why you have this DLL in the first place.

Also there is no reinvent the wheel it's exactly how it works for Steam too hence why we have plenty of games having with a Steam DLL in their install folder and who won't start without it.

Seriously ? First the Gog forum is only visited by a minority of Gog customers, I wouldn't be surprised if the subreddit had more active users than the forum, then we are talking about a thread about Windows XP, which most likely nobody cares about apart from a few, not exactly a very representative sample of Gog customer base.

Also not caring about achievements doesn't mean caring about whenever or not you have an extra DLL in the game folder that will never impact you unless you try to run the game on XP or older OSes.

True, though developers themselves clearly still don't want it. Hence the ongoing mess. Over 1,000 games on that and the only person I see grumble about it regularly is Ancient-Red-Dragon. :-)

For having to rewrite Steam to Galaxy achievements, of course there is. Devs have literally said that themselves the effort is not worth it when asked about their respective games in above linked list.

So perhaps those people are even less interested in social engagement and even more likely to disable it? Who knows. It's simply why I said I'd be interested in seeing the facts for once. (According to GOG "most people use Galaxy". Also according to GOG "Buying Epic Games through Galaxy was one of the most demanded features", yet a quick check on the community wishlist showed just 7 votes at the time (vs thousands for better Linux support), so even official definitions of "what most people want" seems quite flexible around here...)

The amount of resources that have been poured into Galaxy is absolutely absurd at this point. My goodness I forgot about the "(g)" busywork. Genuine question: what did GOG do in terms of big releases prior to Galaxy? Obviously games back then released on Scheme had achievements, were built with Scheme architecture, etc. I guess there weren't as many AAA/AA releases coming to GOG, though on the other hand iirc there are bigger releases that had the "old" installer structure such as Dead Space, Dragon Age Origins, Fallout 3, so surely it is possible especially when we are talking about DRM-free-"unfriendly" companies like EA and Bethesda bringing stuff here.

Or it least it WAS possible before GOG gave up all leverage by allowing Galaxy DRM/online requirements and leading to the modern position of "developers can design games how they want" (or whatever the quote is about allowing some DRM as long as it doesn't substantially affect singleplayer). Worth pointing out again too that supposedly the reason Axiom Verge didn't come here is because the dev didn't want to bother implementing Galaxy. So that is a tangible piece of evidence that at least one game could have come here if not for the insane hyper-focus on Galaxy. On the opposite side of the ledger, I am not aware of any instances in the other direction where a person would have bought a game here, if only it had forced the "optional" client, had content locked behind the "optional" client, etc.

As for the survey of people with/without profiles here, I have to say the sample is way too small and besides that there is an issue of data contamination not unlike what we have seen with "the majority uses Galaxy" (always left out of this idea is the very real fact that Galaxy is pushed as essentially the "default"). With the profiles iirc they were initially forced on everyone and active by default. I don't know if this changed over time or not. But the point is that the number of profile users includes people that don't even realize they have it and/or people who would opt out if they knew. Also the forum isn't very "hip" so naturally reddit and other social media will have more Galaxy users represented.
My personal belief is that the "people" polled were shareholders. Us lowly plebs who want the store to be DRM-free are surely considered subhuman i.e. not people. Even though I would opine it should be considered quite the opposite re: shareholders and customers.

Seems to me the argument here is: most people who use GOG use galaxy and social media so offline installers and forum don’t matter. So exactly the same as steam or epic, question then is what is the point of GOG?

Raw user numbers only matter to statistics and marketing. I bet most Galaxy users only bought 1 or 2 games, one of the reasons was that CyberPunk marketing include a "Were your friends, we make the best games ever, we like you, can you be our friends as well? Can you support us directly so we can avoid the 30% cut to Steam and BTW don't forget to like and subscribe because, hummm, you receive annoying notifications and you can be the one and only to say 'first' " statement.

Unless GOG use Galaxy to sell harvested data, high number of users doesn't mean income.
GOG was built on a niche market, are a niche and going foward I can't see being any less niche.

That said, keeping the original installer as option would be the best for both worlds. But people would be asking more anyway, first the original installer, then the one who include patch03, then the updated version...

The most recent version of Populous 3 didn't work for me, if I didn't had the old installer I couldn't play.

Axiom Verge didn't want to release here because user Barry Woodward harassed them and they thought he was an official GOG rep pretending not to be. That soured them on the whole thing from the outset. Maybe it had something to do with Galaxy too, but it was substantially impacted by his interaction leaving a sour taste in their mouths.