Although I certainly agree that the inclusion of Galaxy should be stated more clearly, the phrase 'game auto-update settings' is unquestionably a reference to its installation.

For me it was when I found out that they didn't have the sense to add an extra screen explaining what they were doing and including the checkbox, rather than burying it under options. I really thought there was no way they would be this stupid. Third-party crapware is already despised...Using these tactics for first-party software is moronic.

EDIT: oops, answered a way old post. not needed at all. sorry.

Also: damnit, I'm trying to backup my games regularly, don't mess it all up, gog! this is really a bad thing you've done (see all the reasons in the thread)

There exist a simple way to tell GOG that one is seriously dissatisfied with the way thing are handled.

I hereby will stop buying from GOG and stay on by current collection of 1115 games.
I will not buy a single game more from GOG before galaxy is broth to the users in a proper way.

Not as bundled bloatware that can only be avoid by clicking on hidden settings.

B-b-but...it felt so nice to have somebody to talk to...

hehe, well it was deep in the night for me and I thought I replied to the last post and only after posting I realized there's around 150 posts after yours (and you'd been replied to already). So I grew a little red in the face, edited my post and went to sleep ;)
Not that I don't want to talk to you :) I'd love to! How are you doing, puzzlemaster? Still on the road?

on topic: since I now heard that the lgogdownloader only gets the classic installers by default (can't even see the galaxy installers via the api) I'm quite appeased. As long as that's the case nobody messed with my backups and I'm all fine ;) source: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/lgogdownloader_gogdownloader_for_linux/post936

Yup. Gonna make it to San Antonio today after a good 9-hour drive. Should prove exciting. The heat, however, may not be so much fun...

Yeah, I can feel that. Been to Italy a few weeks ago and I really wished I was rather clothed like a scheich with long white flowing cloth over all my body instead of being in shirt and short throusers. Would have been cooler and no sun burn. Shame I don't have something like that in my wardrobe.

Good News everyone :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRCzEqkCoiM

Galaxy is fine.

I have been modding Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 with assorted mods. Every time I make mistakes, which is very easy, given how many options there are, I have to reinstall the two games all over again.

I suppose I could've downloaded the installers, but I have a decent connection speed & it doesn't really take long to download the whole thing again.

I'm sure GOG doesn't mind the extra strain on the servers, every single time I restart, because I'm using Galaxy just like they want me to, I'm a good boy.

In fact, I play multiple games at once. Given how my connection is quite fast, I download a game, play it for a while & uninstall it. The save games remain on the disk, and we also have cloud saves for select games! So there's no need to have all these games cluttering my disk, wasting precious space. I just download it again from Galaxy the next day!

If you have a fast connection, you should too. GOG will be very happy when they see all that traffic from galaxy every single time you want to play a game.

Technology is fantastic! Thanks, GOG!

Thanks. Now if I want to buy some of those titles, I'll go straight to Steam instead.

Seriously, I buy games here precisely because you don't put weird crap in. When I download a DOS game from GOG I can rip it out and put it into my frontend with custom settings. When I download a new game from GOG it's because I don't want it to self-update, contact the distributor without my consent, and wrap itself around parts of my system like an overly friendly octopus.

It's your right to decide to be a worse Steam, it's my right to stop buying stuff from you. Those two are strongly correlated ;)

The moment you've all been waiting for hath come. My breakdown of the Galaxy installers. Expect a lot of links. I'll be using the GOG Galaxy installer for Rebel Galaxy (yeah, it sounds weird) and the classic installer for Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth3 to compare both setups.

After download:
> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335724942865858561/unknown.png

First of all, as you know, the GOG Galaxy installers have "(g)" in their names, as you see in the above screenshot. This is in my opinion is by far the easiest way to tell whether a game is a Galaxy installer or not. Which is a shame, because by then it's already on your PC.

It starts with your typical setup language prompt. Now one thing to note about Galaxy installers is that they will be exactly like the classic installers if Galaxy is detected. As a person whose preferred game client of choice is the file browser, I was able to ditch Galaxy for the tests fine.

Setup start:
> Neptunia: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/230796455147864065/335494167813816320/unknown.png
> Rebel Galaxy with Galaxy installed:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335726026053255168/unknown.png
> Rebel Galaxy without Galaxy installed:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335730809287868427/unknown.png

You'll notice that Neptunia and Rebel Galaxy w/ Galaxy show the exact same message below the install path which is
"For more details and to adjust installation settings click Options"

Rebel Galaxy w/o Galaxy however shows a different message.
"For installation and game auto-update settings click Options"

Both messages start with "For" and end with "settings click Options" so it's really subtle until you really pay attention to it. Naturally, the next thing one should do is click Options.

Options:
> Neptunia: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/230796455147864065/335494763476418560/unknown.png
> Rebel Galaxy with Galaxy installed:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335726373576638466/unknown.png
> Rebel Galaxy without Galaxy installed:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335731166067949568/unknown.png

Again, Neptunia and Rebel Galaxy w/ Galaxy show the same stuff. You won't even feel Galaxy was ever inside the installer. Otherwise, w/o Galaxy shows a checkbox called "Keep your game up to date with GOG Galaxy" and tells you how big is it. According to Kayx291, whether the checkbox is toggled across other installers or not is actually a thing. This is for the people who remember the time when Fables admitted it *doesn't* have that functionality.

Install sequence:
> Rebel Galaxy with Galaxy installed (or with the Galaxy checkbox unchecked):
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335727297258586112/unknown.png
> Rebel Galaxy without Galaxy installed and the Galaxy checkbox checked:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335731650317254658/unknown.png

Besides the barebones ads in the non-Galaxy installer which to be honest has a lot less flair than the ones in classic installers (seriously, why axe the snippet that came with these ads, it was seriously something pleasing to the eye to read), the installer will display three windows promoting Galaxy's features if Galaxy is being installed. Said promotions appear only once per setup, after that it will cycle through the available game ads. If you're not installing Galaxy, they won't show up at all.

Install finished:
> Neptunia:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335729707628888079/2017-07-04_21_57_55-Hyperdimension_Neptunia_ReBirth3_V_Generation_Setup.png
> Rebel Galaxy with Galaxy installed:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335727881416343552/unknown.png
> Rebel Galaxy without Galaxy installed:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335732584594014210/unknown.png

All in all, the three cases show no difference here. However, the differences are subtle. For one, I noticed that if you click Launch on Rebel Galaxy without Galaxy installed, it will end up launching Galaxy first as opposed to the game. On the desktop, you will have two additional shortcuts (if you have the game shortcut checkbox enabled), one for the game, and one for Galaxy. The one for the game launches the game right away without going to Galaxy.

Game shortcut properties:
> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335728308719321088/unknown.png

It may say "GoGLauncher.exe" at the end but the result is actually this

Rebel Galaxy Launcher:
> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335728414260723712/unknown.png

As you can see, the shortcut has nothing to do with Galaxy at all. Only pressing Launch actually launches Galaxy. Finally but not last, both games get immediately picked up by Galaxy, since Neptunia 3 relies on a modern version of the classic installer which is Galaxy-friendly.

Galaxy library view:
> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172006506525360129/335729072988749824/unknown.png

Now for the last and most fascinating part. I have only gotten Galaxy to install *twice* from the Galaxy game installer. I tried the setup many times with Galaxy uninstalled, but only twice did Galaxy actually get to be installed on my PC through this way. I have been unable to reproduce the exact way to get Galaxy to fail to install, but seriously, this is not good for GOG's own Galaxy campaign, as this means users are downloading an extra 150MBs which may or may not work in their advantage. Seriously, this is embarrassing.


And I'm finished here. I hope you find this informative on what the current state of affairs are.

All those games have classic installers without Galaxy bundled, how is it worse than Steam where the client is mandatory and you don't have a choice ?

Because I find the passive-aggressive approach obnoxious and Steam at least doesn't pretend it's optional. Also, I prefer Steam to Galaxy if I had to use one.

its a reasonable assumption based on gogs actions since april 2014 or maybe earlier.

at the beginning of this thread, there were many posts criticizing gogs choice to solve the whole galaxy infected installers situation through the addtion of clean, galaxy free installers as an alternative. so everyone has a choice and isn't pushed towards galaxy. there are other elegant ways to achive gogs aim

„As many new users discover and download games from our website, we don’t want them to end up with installations that don’t auto-update or backup saves to the cloud. In fact, we want to offer everyone the most convenient experience from the get-go.“

without being that resource wasteful as this one. this siolution will soon lead to gog announcing that they will from now on only update one of the installers because of resource lack. and guess which one they will choose to keep up to date?

seriously, i can't think of anyone not being able to get galaxy from gog so far. and even if there is a small amount of gogers, then providing a download link for galaxy in every game card would be enough and not that resource wasteful.

this way to solve the problem smells like gogs next shady, pathetic attempt to push galaxy against the will of their customer base. i guess most gogers did try galaxy and after a time period abandoned it, because its useless. it looks like their galaxy project isn't a success at all and not enough users are using it compared to all the resources gog pumped into galaxy so far at the cost of not fixing game and other important bugs. all hail to achivements! they're trying to push it though their „elegant“ solution and so saving galaxy from being a total failure. so keeping the classic installer outdated would come handy for gog.