Posted April 01, 2020
SirPrimalform: If you consider this to have made Galaxy obligatory, then by your standards the downloader was obligatory before Galaxy was around.
Still playing pretend ? Whether an auto-sorting dowloading tool became more or less indispensible in practice, with the progressive growth of libraries and updates, is a thing. Whether there is a deliberate intent to coerce people into installing a soft designed for a plethora of other functions (monitoring, advertising, socializing, etc) is another. I want you to take my chainsaw, you don't want a chainsaw you need a keyring, too bad there aren't any keyrings anymore but there's that chainsaw that doubles as a keyring. You can turn it off in the options.
It is imposing a social network game management tracker, that is shitty practice, every each way is used to that effect (and GOG has been using every possible obnoxious ways for ages, backpedalling on a few of these because of customers irritations, and showing the general intent transparently in the process). Having it feature a handy downloader that is removed elsewhere is just one in the list of dick-ish ways. Again, like (why do I still fucking need to seek yet other analogies at this point) if facebook became the last text editor.
Yes, nowadays people absolutely revel in having everything embedded. Having their google account for email, youtube, browsing, chatting, videoconferencing, the whole suite. Having their mobile phone bloated with so welcome and so convenient social networking apps (that you're not absolutely forced to run anyway). It's the norm. I won't make you grasp the interest of keeping separate minimalist tools instead of one supermagma of imposed device collections linked to one account, with at best some on/off flips to monitor. Yeepee and all that. I just point out that GOG's support originally came from its deviation from that logic (now fully embraced by he company and its customers alike).
But yeah, who cares. Pretend to not see the difference between a download manager and an achievement/tracking/multiplayer/advertisement/integration/launcher machine if both are "obligatory" for downloads.