No and yes... It's in "beta" officially since a week or so before The Witcher 3 was released, in terms of official name labelling. It's certainly debatable as to whether the software features and stability should be considered "beta" or "alpha" quality in terms of availability, stability and reliability however, but that's entirely subjective. Officially, it is beta.

Regardless those release management terms are somewhat arbitrary. More importantly, it's the software's ongoing developmental status that I think concerns people more than release management labelling terminology used. It seems clear they released it somewhat before it was ready in order to capitalize on the massive press of the Witcher 3 release, and ride the wave. From a business standpoint I can't fault them for that at all no matter how ugly it may have been under the hood, opportunities like that don't fall out of trees often and CDPR's next major game isn't slated for a couple more years at least likely. So perhaps they released early and they get some verbal black eyes for it over time, but ultimately it was worth it no matter how bad one's views are about Galaxy.

What's missing now is whether or not they have a concrete written in stone and non-growing list of features they're targeting for the official non-beta stable release, and what timeline they might be targeting for that. I'm not asking nor expecting them to publicly disclose that, but just curious that they actually have that internally at least. My biggest fear is that it stays in a semi-perpetual beta state and moves forward with creeping featuritis for years more to come. I'd rather see a very short small list of solid must-have features banged out and stabilized to release quality, then jam the version X.Y stamp on it and shove it out the door, maintaining a stable branch of bug fixes and minor incremental features off of that, while developing a next-gen version with larger features for down the line.

They've kind of hinted that they're already sort of doing some of that in public posts in the past. Someone from GOG mentioned a future 1.2 release would have more features although I'm not sure if they said what they would be for example.

Another question is - what the criterion are for measuring code quality and state of project to declare "out of beta, release quality" to aim for. It's hard for us to measure here on the outside, because we only really see the client front-end UI, but probably 90% of the code they are hammering on is backend services that are mostly invisible to the end customer, the APIs to talk to that, the stuff under the hood on the client side including the Galaxy library, etc. The client and it's web UI are a small fraction of all of that, but the only thing most of us really see, and if the UI doesn't change materially much over time - it gives the visual impression that nothing is happening even if a lot is happening behind the scenes that is just not anywhere near as visible.

Even acknowledging all of that though, it'd sure be awesome to see more UI visible changes happening that have direct in your face end user interaction and impact, with which users can measure visible improvements from release to release beyond just bug fixing.

Personally, I'm going to speculate that we'll see a Galaxy 1.2 before the end of the year however I think it will most likely still be considered a beta for some time to come. Hopefully they add enough major new features to draw more people's interest and to address other issues that put people off from it now to make them reconsider it in the future. Ultimately it's up to them to convince people to use it on the software's own merits though, but that has been their stated intention all along. Time will tell...

Ha! +1

Yeah, the number 300 was pulled right out of my ass of course. :) More importantly though, whether we hypothesize that GOG has 10 million customers, 5 million customers, 1 million customers or some other number of total customers, when you consider the number of posters in the forums to be in 2 to 3 digits in a given time frame of say - one month or so, or even in the low 4 digits over such time frame, the number of people posting in the forums as a percentage of the total userbase is many orders of magnitude smaller, even with wide margins of range on the predictions of the total size of the customer base and the total number of posters. For example, if we pull numbers out of my ass such as 5 million customers and 500 unique posters per month, the total number of people in the forums posting would represent 0.1% of the total number of customers and that's being very generous I think. If you were to further refine it to the number of people posting more than one single question or comment and look at those who actually participate to a greater degree it would be an even smaller percentage, possibly 0.01% or 0.001%.

So even the most vocal of opinions aren't necessarily reflective of the hypothetical 4,999,500 others that don't visit the forums ever at all. Nonetheless, sometimes when we're vocal here, whether we speak on an issue where we're a vocal minority or we're actually speaking knowingly or unknowingly about something vocally that the majority does or would agree with - it's possible that it may translate to a disproportionate amount of attention being brought to a given issue possibly resulting in changes to the service or software as a result. That could be for better or worse.

Likewise the opposite may sometimes be true also, where an important issue does occur and there is highly vocal discussion about it to which it seems there is no visible net effect of the discussion, no actions visibly taken, which could also be for better or worse.

In the end though whether being vocal as a majority or minority ends up having an effect on something or not, it's more likely to have an effect than not because an unheard voice is one that is less likely to affect change. That's probably why vocal minorities do end up more likely to be heard on certain issues, as the content majority may remain in silence on a given topic either out of fear of conflict, or out of lack of awareness a discussion is even occurring about a given topic. :)

I hate you and everything you stand for. Well except the galaxy bit, I'm ok with that. Once there's a multiplayer game I'd like to play, I'll embrace galaxy myself.