I've been installing various games from the recent sales, and the Witcher update, and there is a general problem with the installer. They install everything as "Run as Admin", which shouldn't be needed for most things that came out this century.

Witcher, Spelunky, Unepic, Avernum, none of those should require admin. Anything that does need admin should have its manifest stripped so that the OS virtualizes the admin only locations.

I am not talking about running the installer as admin, I have no issues with that. It's the game shortcuts that shouldn't be installed as requiring admin. First thing I generally do is strip off the admin requirement, and things still run fine.

I might be wrong, but I think the run as admin comes in handy when you run games under different compatibility modes.

That would be handled by stripping the manifest. When you do that all file writes and registry writes that normally require administrative access get redirected. 9X games wouldn't have natively had a manifest, only XP and later would. Even then, most XP games would've had the default one that could be safely stripped; if they were smart enough to put a non-default manifest in, it probably handles running as non-admin properly.

Spelunky, Redshirts, Witcher are not what I call "older" games. Almost anything after 2007 or so will be fine without admin, many things after 2000 will be.

And I don't get "just in case" reasoning when older versions of their installers didn't require it and patches didn't add it.

And as a dev, a design bug is still a bug, even if working as designed :-P. Anything that doesn't follow principle of least privilege is a design bug.

I don't think this is a new thing. I believe the reason for that is that they make minimal changes to the way the games work. I remember the King's Quest games being rather complicated to save because of where the saves are located.

Something like this would probably require more surgery than what they're able to accomplish without access to the source code.

Well, I'd suggest to contact GOG support (in a constructive manner, as you did here in the thread) and ask them about the reasons, or suggest that the person writing the installers could contact you. The coders probably won't see a "random" thread on the forum, and the people who might actually see the thread will probably not know the answer to such a specific technical question.

GOG is pretty good in terms of customer care, so such a request has a higher chance of leading to something constructive than in many similar shops. However, it would probably be a good idea to demonstrate in which way the current implementation is (or could be) causing actual problems. A "necessary fix" would probably get higher priority than a convenience feature or an adjustment to meet abstract design principles.

I did that almost a year ago, before installer 2.x became prevalent. I'm hoping something public will garner more attention.

That's unlikely though, because as far as I can see, you still haven't explained what's the actual problem with defaulting to admin mode is. So if you are resorting to "public pressure" methods to push a point (which is a questionable tactic that I'm not fond of, but more on that later), you're definitely doing it wrong, because instead of making people think "that's definitely a problem that needs to be fixed", you rather leave people scratching their heads and asking "And that is a problem how ...?"

But anyway. I'm not supporting attempts to "put public pressure" on a shop with as good customer care as GOG. If you're not satisfied with the answer you were given, then follow up on it, and explain to them why. Make yourself clear to them, they usually listen.

What it currently looks like, though, is that you had a suggestion, it didn't get through, and you now try to rally public pressure to push it through regardless, while misrepresenting the situation as a "bug" when you were already clearly told that it's an intended mechanism.

I don't get this at all with any installers. I have UAC turned off, though.

How many times do yo need to be told, just because it's intended doesn't mean its not a bug? Hard coded passwords are intended. WMF files executing as code were intended. Metro is intended. Word documents able to read Outlook and send mail is intended (see the recent anniversary in the IT news?).

GoG is going to Linux software. How quickly do you think they'd be laughed out of that market if every one of the games is suid root? This is exactly the same, the only difference is how the average user views it.

Quick question, are you talking about the windows installers requiring admin privileges, or the games requiring admin privileges? Because if it's the installers, I thought the usual method on linux was "sudo apt-get", not "apt-get".

I mean the games.

Installers requiring admin is perfectly acceptable. It'd be nice if they didn't (e.g. ./configure --prefix=$HOME;make;make install), but I don't consider it crucial. It's a nice-to-have but so few have it, I don't consider it a knock against at all. Only things I've seen on Windows not need it that have installers are Chrome and a security product I worked on. A good chunk of the games from the various Humble Bundles have just been unzip wherever so don't need any permissions.

Not everything though... I still wonder what remotely sensible reason Star Wars: The Old Republic has for requiring to be run as admin.

Yup, you're absolutely correct. I can't be bothered to search for it now, but I do know that at least until recently, troubleshooting FAQ was recommending you to turn off UAC, which is just mindboggingly stupid advice and incredibly unprofessional.

Right now, the admin privileges is used as a compatibility thing for old games (which most of the time don't need it anyway just by the way), and for new games which don't need it at all. Which... Well, too is kind of stupid and incredibly unprofessional, I mean purposefully bypassing security measures introduced in Vista in any way is a terrible idea in general - especially singe GOG prides themselves on testing everything they release - surely, it would not be difficult to figure out whether or not a game needs admin privileges to work correctly, right?