Galaxy has not been running on my computer for a few weeks, however I recently noticed a notification in my Activity Feed on the website. How am I getting achievements for a game if I'm directly starting with the .exe file, and NOT starting thru Galaxy? How exactly is the the GOG website collecting this data?

You certain it's not running in the background?

It's also possible that the profile activity feed might have delayed visible updating until now.

Yes, I shut it down a while back and removed it from my startup. There's nothing in the Task Manager running that has GOG or Galaxy associated with it running. I even outputted the modules associated tasklist/m with them and did a search for gog or galaxy in case I missed something. The 2 services associated with it were set to manual, and have now been set to disabled, as I haven't uninstalled it yet. They weren't running when I looked at it.

The achievement I received was from something I did today and yesterday, as I just started playing that game. The previous game information that shows up on my feed are from when I actually had Galaxy running. Is there something different about Tyranny?

So you played the game today and yesterday, but you haven't booted up Galaxy at all since?

Huh, I mean I'd get that Galaxy could in theory keep tabs on a game and update achievements when it gets booted up from a static save file, but if you haven't used Galaxy since I don't get why the achievement would get recorded otherwise.

I ran Galaxy a couple days ago for the first time in a long while, and there were some achievements for a few games I'd been playing. I rarely use Galaxy, and never for running games; it definitely does not run unless I manually launch it (made sure of that long ago). However some games do have a Galaxy library that's used whether you have Galaxy running or not, and the library does connect to the internet unless you block it. I wasn't aware of the activity feed since apparently that depends on having your profile active, which I don't.

A little bit late, but I came here from google so it might be helpful for someone like me.

When you log in to the Galaxy for the first time, it creates a registry entry with your gog username and some unique identifiers in it. Certain games are programmed that way so they can send achievements information directly to the gog api servers depending only on these registry entries, without galaxy even installed. I don't remember the path, but you can find this registry entry easily with CTRL+F and type your gog username.

I didn't read any docs, but for the most part, it works something like that, I can be wrong in the details.

their secret eye is watching you :D