Just curious, what does the spyware even do anyway? Send game statistics back, like playing time, amount of time spent in a level, etc? It is off-putting regardless of how little or lot it sends, of course. Honestly, I never like when games even have ads in the menu for DLC etc!

As for boycotting, I have discussed my stance of only buying must-haves, and practically speaking considering buying offline installers while we are still able. New release Mechajammer seems like it will be getting reworked a lot compared to the initial release; so people who do like it as it is should make sure to buy it now or lose the chance.

It would do a lot for consumer goodwill if Epic spyware was kept out of GOG, Galaxy spyware was kept out of GOG, DRM was removed from Cyberpunk cosmetic content (seriously, how can there be any excuse for this when it's "their own" game essentially).

Not something everybody might be able to do but in situations like this it certainly pays off having a completely offline machine around.

Even if that weren't the case - just putting all those bloat/spyware services on ye olde blacklist of your firewall does the trick as well. Not the ideal solution (which would be if all this crap wasn't included in the first place) but at least it's a solution.

TBH I don’t know, I haven’t checked. All I checked was wether the gog version works without those files, it doesn’t, you can only remove the discord ones. Otherwise it says you are not authorised to run TQ. As these are not present in the previous version, I have removed 10b, and will not go near any future updates. There is absolutely no reason to leave dlls for various platforms in there and required, it’s simply lazy. Afraid I don’t have time now to check 10c (latest patch) as I am running my fixed timepoint backup (yes, you need to have these as gog cannot be trusted, and installer updates break, add galaxy spyware, or remove content, with no changelog or option to access previous versions, as in this case).

strange, the posts I see in the linked thread suggest that ihey aren't needed

They are not needed, nor is GOG galaxy ones or the discord ones. Unfortunately THQ have taken the steps to make them required. In the previous version there was the GOG galaxy ones and the discord ones, you could delete the discord ones, but not the galaxy ones-game just would start at all. In the new update 10b (not seen 10c), discord, galaxy, steam, and epic are now all present and only discord ones can be removed. If you remove the epic ones then at launch you get a box stating you are not authorised to use this product (probably part of the epic drm system). Essentially, even at best case and these are just dead ends, then it is extremely lazy by the devs to leave all requirements in all builds, at worse it’s installing spyware on your machine. GOG store is not epic or steam store, it does not need these links as the previous version clearly shows.

Doesn’t look like GOG or THQ are going to bother answering this though. Anyone have the latest update and can confirm if it contains these folders in install location/THQNordicOnline??

Well I do have the 2.10c version and can confirm that the folders and dlls are there. I also tried to delete them and only left the ones on gog subdir, and the game started OK with no errors. I could start single player game and could also list online games (did not try to join any, tough). I did not see any message "you are not authorized".

Ok, I just downloaded version 10c. You are correct, this version you can remove all the folders in THQNordicOnline except gog and it does indeed launch. So it seems they have fixed the issue in the latest release.

Just goes to show, all this could have been avoided by simple effort of providing a changelog!

Anyways, fixed for now. Be ever vigilant though, it will come round again.