There's a big difference between asking something and being obnoxious. Not to mention: since when do you advocate for everyone who thinks GOG should review the Program? Or anything to begin with?

"You just randomly attacked those who agree that the Program should be reviewed by GOG and that GOG should offer us the choice to use the original Offline Installers builds"

Unless most of the games end up being broken or perform noticeably worse compared to the previous version: this is a completely valid criticism from me. Idk wouldn't that be more sensible if you were to push for the games that are actually broken? Are you telling me that every customer is deeply offended that GOG has modified some game that works for everybody who purchased it, without any issues? Didn't they do that from the start to begin with? You know back in 2008-2010? Because otherwise they would have sold broken products, I guess?

"The kind of thing they are doing with the Preservation Program offline installer builds is the same Steam does with forced updates, giving us no choice if we even want the update or not"

Also, is it just me who can turn off those so called "forced" updates when using Steam or what are you talking about exactly?

"If your counter argument is this, I don't even know what to say. :/"

It is your decision to not use Galaxy to roll back - provided you are experiencing any issues and cannot wait till GOG fixes the current version - than delete Galaxy, since you are not using it for anything else, but that does not mean others are not willing to do that. Again you are not advocating for everybody.

In my opinion you should push for issues getting fixed, but not like this thread does. Provided that is the goal to begin with, because it is more of being obnoxious at this point. What they are doing is hardly killing games, since 15-20 years ago they did the same with games and some of them still work for me without any issues.

What actually killing games is when support completely stops and on top of that you are no longer able to purchase them anywhere, maybe physical copies, because the previous owner no longer need it.

I'm another one who is not willing to do it either. Is the client "optional" or not? How are people going to advocate in favor of this "optional" client, only to turn around and say "oh yeah, when it comes to [x] feature, there is no other option than but to use the client". Nonsensical and continuing to erode GOG's brand.

By the way, this issue is directly relevant to the topic at hand of the Preservation Program. GOG's approach, whether intended or not, of Galaxy users effectively being a preferred class over non-Galaxy users is contributing to the negativity some users have towards the Preservation Program's updates.

Several users (including me) have made the point that there would not be the same amount of criticism and outcry over Preservation Program possibly breaking games, were we able to just download the "old" version of an offline installer through our browser. It is an easy lay-up of a solution. They've done it with patches in the past.

You may wonder what is so objectionable to someone like me about using Galaxy to merely rollback, and then delete. My answer to that question is: I am against the continued pushing of Galaxy and its potential to become an effectively DRMed walled garden. By using it even once, even just to download an offline installer, I feel there is a (likely) risk that I will be "counted" in GOG's internal metrics as a "Galaxy user" (similar to someone watching something for just a minute on Netflix). In theory, GOG (the store) could hypothetically pivot away from DRM-free if corporate decides there are sufficient enough "Galaxy users" to do so (even if the numbers were "shoddy"/questionable in the way I described).

I agree.

GOG not providing the offline installer link to the previous game build while the galaxy client allows this function, that is intentional.

The build is already in their servers. What needs to be done is just provide a link to it for those who download installers from the webpage rather than keep giving customers the proverbial middle finger: it’s either this way or the highway.

You will never beat Steam or never even remotely get close to doing so.

You got something good going on, can’t you just appreciate what you’ve got? Corporate greed...

I understand and agree with the overall sentiment of your last post. Text communication is hard because many nuances of significance and meaning are lost due to personal interpretations, world views and cultural barriers. Its an international forum after all. We all here want the best for GOG and the games we buy I believe.
I also believe in GOG's true intentions with the Program, but the fact that there are problems can't be ignored or taken lightly, because, unfortunately, as you also know and agreed, some people are having problems which must be corrected.

Corrected, that is, by giving us (all of us), like others have masterfully explained, options on how we want to approach the Program. Be it offering us a non obligatory patch or Offline Installers Rollback.

Please, also understand that Im not fear mongering when trying to warn about the risks present in the program right now.
This is a controversial topic and people disagreeing and debating over this in this thread proves this point:
Other users are also worried. Users that are not affected are worried. Users that are affected are even more worried as they're facing the issues with the products they bought.

Thank you.

(Im one of the users affected by the way - the "One Fix to Rule Them All", that is, the "limit game CPU to 2 cores for stability" which they're applying unresponsively to, what seems to me, all games added to the Program (?). Thus, breaking game compatibility with older systems straight away without giving them the options to rollback with offline installers. This has already been explained in this thread at least 4 times. Sorry to repeat myself again.)

I feel that at this point people that disagree with those of us that are concerned about Preservation Program should just read previous posts because many of these points were answered already by me, or by the other participants on the thread.
Some of these points arguing against the thread's focus are straight out fallacies and lies about what I, personally, or many others, really think about the matter. To add to that, subjective opinions that do not change the facts we base our concern of off.

Though I understand you not wanting to read the previous posts, so to be short:

- I never said Im talking "for everybody" and it was never my intention. May you please read the first posts that directly link other thread I also made in the past warning GOG about the issue?

- This is a forum. Many people are talking here. And many have already explained why they're also concerned about how GOG handled things like in the past and is handling this right now.

- Im not "fear mongering". The "fear of something happening", already happened with some games and specially some Offline Installers. If this happened now, what guarantee you give me that it won't happen again in the future with other games?

- Steam forces updates and all games require to be updated before they can be played. Yes, in settings you can deactivate 'Auto Updates', but the less terrible option there is "Update only when game starts". There are no "Never update" option.
If you're talking about "Well, don't connect Steam online then!" You gotta be kidding. The service, launcher, store, everything, is online dependant. This is exactly the reason I came to GOG in the first place...

- Sorry, but I just said that if one of your counter arguments would be "Just use Galaxy for rollback" I wouldn't know what to say. To add to that, the implication of what you answered is: "If you don't want to use it, don't complain because others can use it."

rjbuffchix already answered your post and you may find surprising that not everyone agrees with Galaxy and how its being little by little being forced to users here.
Have you actually read any of the threads complaining and explaining on how Offline Installers users are treated as second class citizens around here? Missing updates, no rollback, and so on?

So I will leave it at that. :/

This is entirely the point. Thanks.

Exactly. I did not had a backup copy of some of the games that were later added to the Preservation Program unfortunately.
Some of them had the performance affected as the posts by
AB2012
Braggadar
well explained.

(separated the links above as it was causing forum formatting issues :p)

What I had to do was to use lgogdownloader to download previous builds and fix my games.
I could only do that because Im on Linux and because lgogdownloader uses Galaxy API to download offline installers and can also download old galaxy builds. Now, the point is, it is solved for me? Sure.

What about people that can't or don't use galaxy, can't or don't even know how to use lgogdownloader and want just to use Offline Installers? What about the preservation of these Pre-Program offline installers? They're lost, except to those that already had backup copies of them.

-- The many edits:
Forum formatting weirdness.

Yes, you and others are engaging in fearmongering. If you were a newspaper, you would be engaging in yellow journalism. "The preservation program is killing GAMES!"

Your example pool is not only small, but you also choose to ignore certain facts and instead claim, "GOG abandoned them!"

Then you say, "Why do I have to use Galaxy to download old versions of installers?" Galaxy is not a paid service, and you only need to download the game once; afterward, you can store the offline installers wherever you want. Using Galaxy to download a game is "not good!", but using a third-party tool—whose full functionality is unknown—is considered "awesome because it means I don't have to use GOG!"

GOG's Unique Selling Point is in not needing a client, not in having to use one then pretending you don't. Quite honestly I find the constant Galaxy pitch tedious as well. A lot of what people are asking for here is simply the ability to "roll-back" to one offline installer so they can backup that offline installer (Galaxy's "rollback" doesn't provide you with an older offline installer to backup, it just modifies files directly to the install folder "The Steam Way").

We are arguing to improve the offline installer experience without taking anything away from Galaxy users. You're simply arguing "Well I like Galaxy so why can't everyone else just be me" non-arguments that constantly want to keep offline installers in a 2nd class state. To call the former "fear-mongering" and the latter "reasonable like me" is beyond self-parody.

I am not debating whether Galaxy is optional or not and also feels like you almost ignored everything I wrote. You guys should just stop this and either pressure GOG to provide the older versions of the offline installers for the problematic games or just ask support directly to provide you a copy, since they should have one. After all if Galaxy has that kind of feature, it should be doable. The reason why I did not brought this up until know should be obvious: Galaxy is the faster and easier solution compared to waiting for support to do their thing.

I mean, this is kind of one of the secondary purposes of this thread. How do you propose we pressure GOG to provide the older versions without showing that they are necessary?

You are way out of step with how you view Galaxy. If the versions exist on Galaxy there is no reason they shouldn't be available as standalone downloads too. That is what most people expect here.

1. There is nothing subjective about this matter or what I wrote in my previous posts. Or are you straight up denying the fact, that GOG used to sell "fixed" or "modified" games compared to other platforms? Or everything else I wrote in my previous posts?

2. You went out your way to react to me and others didn't. That should tell something.

3. Yes, this is a forum and I am free to talk about some of the crazy things I am constantly seeing here. To be honest it somehow got worse, throughout the years.

4. I did not talk about "fear mongering", only called your statements obnoxious, because they are, you are sabotaging yourself and everyone else with supporting the statement "Preservation Program is killing games". I elaborated in my previous post what is actually killing games.

5. There should be a roll back function there as well, but honestly it does not even matter if it is actually viable on Steam or not in the context we are talking about about it. I already mentioned better alternatives.

6. Yes, that is one of the counter arguments, but you intentonally ignored the fact that you should be pushing to have the offline installers for the problematic games only. That is the other one. Or contacting support for an older build.
"So yeah... basically my "FEAR" is true: Every single game GOG's touching with this freaking marketing program will be broken or have high risks of breaking. and apparently they will just ignore forum posts about the issue even on large games as Dragon Age Origins... that makes me wonder once again: What about the smaller games being added to the marketing "preservation" program? They will be "broken, on GOG, forever!"

Will we need to spam the forum everyday for this madness to stop?
Better just rely on Steam for preservation at this point, with the correct tools Steam versions of such games can be preserved better than those on GOG - at least right now."

This is straight up copied from the OP's post, you don't say it is secondary purpose! You cannot make this up!

And yet nobody asked for this program.

I agree with you.
I don't think that the necessity of relying on a third party tool to download my games is good either.
That only proves the point though. The point that if GOG offered us rollback for offline installers as they do for Galaxy any of our concerns wouldn't matter. Or if they somehow resurrected the GOG Downloader project the veterans around here praise, but about that I can't say anything as I wasn't here at the time of its lifespan.

This also indirectly proves another point: The point the sometimes small teams inside of companies make short-sighted decisions based on the need for fast results and sometimes these decision aren't well planned enough.
Community then brings up solutions to these problems because the whole community is an entity much bigger with more test data and varying scenarios perspectives. Lgogdownloader and GOGcli GUI are awesome tools this community made (shout out to sude and timboil for their awesome work over the years) that also proves this point.

I wouldn't be able to re download working DA:O and The Witcher builds on my system if these tools didn't existed.

We should remember that GOG themselves admit that they're a small team compared to bigger business and their strategies are also planned to reflect this kind of business model:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/cd_projekt_strategy_and_development_of_the_company_financial_results_suggestions_by_armchair_ceos/post766 What I mean by this is that, also as other already explained on this thread, GOG community do want to work with GOG for a better gaming environment. These projects above are examples of this too I think.

########################

The post got so big that I needed to divide it in two parts. Sorry for that.
Here's the second part:

########################

Debatable, but I will move on.

You say that, I say I didn't. You can think what you will.
I'm trying to answer the topics I think are relevant to the thread only.

You're entitled to your opinion. This is irrelevant to the topic of the thread It seems to me.

Oh, sorry then. I may have confused the posts, If you didn't, my bad.
As you can see these last posts are really big, so it might have been my failure indeed.
Anyway, I don't think they're obnoxious. But, again, its your opinion, we are all free to have them.
This is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

I also think that you may be partially right on what is actually 'killing games'.
We can both be right to varying degrees. No problem at that too I think.

If you carefully read my first post, as it seems you did by your next and final quotes, you will notice that I excuse the purposefully chosen "click baity" and "eye catchy" thread name and you can also be redirected to my 2024 thread with a more balanced approach to the topic and a more on-ground name relating the issue more language-carefully and more respectfully, as I normally do when I decide to post something.
I purposefully used that language this time because to me things escalated badly after F.E.A.R being added to the program.

I will quote myself on the first post: I will explain at the end of this post why the F.E.A.R situation escalated to me.

Sure. Irrelevant to the topic at hand. Moving on.

I shouldn't because I hardly disagree. We need the original Offline Installers for ALL games being added to the Preservation Program because, as explained in this thread by others and me:

- The program is still experimental prone to human error and failure (as it has already happened with some games)
- We don't know fully what games were affected and neither GOG or the community had time to fully test them (The proof of that is the fact that more than 2 games were badly affected)
- Some games that were affected are not yet fixed and people have complained about it for months now

Solution:

- Give us the original offline installers back or the rollback feature available on Galaxy for offline download.

I'm not trying to make anything up and I don't think he is too if I got things right (posts are getting big).
The fact continues true:

Games being added to the Preservation Program are at high risk of being broken.
Now I will point out with my factual example of why the F.E.A.R situation escalated to me:

You see, In regards to PC gaming, I game on an old notebook from 2017.
As you can imagine, It can't run triple AAA games and I really don't care too much about it as I'm mostly playing old games or emulating others games I enjoy from long time ago.

F.E.A.R works fine on this notebook. This update with the preservation program had the unfortunate result of breaking compatibility with older Intel CPUs as (once again repeating myself here, sorry :P...) AB2012 explained on his post here on this thread and on others. Even on the F.E.A.R thread GOG made to announce its addition with the others games added this month.

So when I try to download the offline installer of a previous version of it, I can't.
I was going to do what I did with Dragon Age: Origins and The Witcher when they were added to the program:

Opened up the terminal, and used lgogdownloader commands: ..to download its latest build Pre-Program. To my surprise, unfortunately, F.E.A.R is so old that back then when GOG added it to the store, it used Gen 1 Galaxy API and lgogdownloader sadly doesn't support Gen 1 Galaxy builds.
So I thought: "Well then, now what? Im stuck with a broken version of the game I bought and I can't play it my system."

What can we do now without the original offline installer builds? Nothing. What we can do is exactly what I'm doing right now: "Complaining on the forums".
Mind you, before I was hardly affected, I created this thread:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/preservation_program_killing_offline_installers_preservation/page1

Fortunately with DA:O and The Witcher I could reverse the problem. But with F.E.A.R, I can't.
What else you expect from us being affected by the problem directly?

###################

Sorry for the giant posts by the way, Im trying the thoroughly answer the counter arguments proposed the way I can.

-- The many edits, again:
Formatting issues, corrections, typing errors..

GOG needs the "program" to stay afloat (relevant) as I outlined here: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/tests_at_the_checkout/page2

...at least to me, but you know what opinions are worth at the end of the day.

Now, "Preservation" to ALL users and me means the same thing, but "Preservation" to GOG apparently means something else such as: improved this, enhanced that, etc... that doesn't sound a lot like preservation the way most users have in mind, we seem to all agree on that.

All you have to do is go here and scroll to see how many games have been "improved" other than just "preserved": https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program#82efde0a-bb4b-4551-b2eb-2942338aa177
Click on those dropdown lists and see for yourselves the things they improved not just for compatibility's sake with modern systems.

In some cases improvement actually broke things for a few games apparently...

I served them an opportunity to "improve" a game they sell in their store and they did nothing. That speaks volumes as to how much they care about "Preservation" at least seen through their own model.

I am not going to post the link to the game in question anymore, cause frankly I've had it and I don't want to spam threads more than I already have with this... it's in earlier posts of this thread, you can find it out if you care.

If you wish to grasp just how much they care about anything really, whether that is preservation or improvement, see it for yourself in my video or rather "hear" it.

I swear, I hate to have to use language but at the end of the day: they don't give a shit.

There's insights I would like to bring about the game I modded, as to why audio was released (by developer and publisher) in low quality rather than high quality... that means the game should have supported high quality audio from day 1. I keep calling it a mod, but in my view that is how the game should have released back in the year 2000 but developer and publisher opted not to (IMO). Of course that can't be done here in this thread.

But again, if you care, go watch part of it and say it out loud to me: your mod sucks! No wonder GOG isn't interested... I'd prefer that, over GOG not communicating to me (via email) when there was a brief exchange between them and me.

Not telling me: sorry, our hands are tied... this is beyond us... there's legalities involved that we can't cross, etc. Instead saying nothing implies to me they expected me to release the mod out on the internet anyway, ultimately to their own benefit and theirs alone.

Smells like corporate greed, this and just about anything else covered in this thread. But again, just my opinion.

edit: weird forum formatting.

Your posts remind me of that other certain user with their old alt account who claims to have written the character Johnny Silverhand for Cyberpunk 2077. Are you coming from a certain Discord server here? Which VPN are you using? It is really remarkable how you are specifically targeting the preservation program.

How would you even know whether I use a vpn or not? What are you saying?

I don’t claim anything, I’ve actually done it!

Since you seem to enjoy playing investigator here it is:

Playlist with 1 minute long audio comparison videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbaAx5NSsgo&list=PL09vbdSCGvkdHl9lrcvOUXwX41adLn0yt

Full game play-through:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IsBuGW5kZk

Quit harassing me!

edit: links

A random person claims they have done improvement mods for certain games. GOG ignores this person and now GOG are not doing anything for "preservation". With "your" mods it suddenly becomes "preservation". Without "your" mods GOG is not doing enough for "preservation". This doesn't sound fishy at all, right? Here is the problem. Why haven't you released these mods? Why aren't you releasing them on ModDB for example?