I think Norton missed a most pernicious piece of malware that is currently festering on your device.

The fact that you still believe this despite being proved wrong in the other thread shows you've learned nothing.

You're also forgetting that Valve is headquartered in Bellevue, WA (15 mins drive from Seattle). There's currently a magnitude 9 earthquake doomsday clock set for the American and/or Canadian Pacific northwest coast one day (due to sitting on the Pacific rim) that could destroy their headquarters at any time and there's zero guarantee you'll be able to access your games unless they store their servers elsewhere (which they haven't disclosed to my knowledge) - https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/how-earthquake-scientists-solved-the-mystery-of-the-last-big-one-in-the-pacific-northwest/ I don't recommend trying to poke the wasp's nest, you're only going to get stung at this rate.

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But to answer to your OP question:

1. Games can run independently of Galaxy when GOG eventually stops supporting it and they're more likely to go bankrupt at this rate compared to Valve

2. Not subjected to ads, telemetry, and suggested engagement - Galaxy 2 has gone super heavy with ads on every game title and/or store page and asking for reviews

3. Not having your hours played tracked and used against you when you ask for a refund - e.g., left a game on for 8 hours even though I had ~2 hours of actual playtime and was used for pushback against me

4. Less resources tied up in CPU/RAM

5. Games start up faster without having to be relaunched through Galaxy

6. Not being stressed out by achievements if it exists for that game and for those with unhealthy compulsions

7. In a perfect world, offline installers without being built to be compatible with Galaxy builds would start up within 2-5 s instead of 15 s as AB2012 has mentioned before

Look pal, my boss showed me his chatgpt subscription and then left me with a question...

my response was to first get a google phone with gemini pre installed to look sharper during meetings and now i'm contemplating a 3000 dollar upgrade for my pc, capice?!?!

Completely.

Just to spite you.

That is all there is to it, really.

In an unprecedented twist of events, I download my offline installers through Galaxy. Especially for games like Cyberpunk, you can lose track of the files as they get swapped on the site for updates. Galaxy just keeps things in order.

I also don't mind tracking my progress. I come from the land of Xbox achievements, so I appreciate a dopamine trophy here and there.

I don't always go through Galaxy though, I have plenty of missed hours from playing without the launcher. It's not like using Galaxy restricts you to the launcher. Even if you download a game from there, it just downloads the standard offline files you'd get from the site. In fact, to track a game at all, you have to click "Play" through Galaxy, otherwise it has no idea you have opened the game. You're still "offline".

I think this is a use case for Galaxy that can be appreciated even if you dislike launchers, just treating it as an installer for games.

One of the simplest reasons to not use or install through Galaxy when it doesn't inconvenience you is to decrease the likelihood of GOG removing the option. e.g.: "Since most users use Galaxy, we're cutting support for non-Galaxy downloads"

What does GOG gain by restricting such a thing to their launcher? The people who buy games through Galaxy and the people who buy games on GOG.com are using the same service. There's no incentive that I can personally think of to try and push Galaxy this way.

Vendor lock-in. They are simply trying to mimic the strategy Valve adopted and pushed Steam in its current quasi-monopoly state.

We all know it is never going to work that way for GOG, with the sad exception of the people devising GOG commercial strategies.

Another troll bait thread lol.

(grabs popcorn)

Aaaaaaaaaaaand we have another front-line...

Ads and data. How many more game ads do you see when you launch a game through Galaxy vs without? How much more more data do you give up? My only question for practices like that is "Is it mostly greed or mostly necessity?" People gotta get paid, raises gonna be needed, and there's always a greedy person trying to get theirs.

Edit: If anybody knows a solution to the "I can no longer post reviews or new topics" matter, DM me.

I suppose ignoring the impracticality of it, these reasons would be an incentive from a company perspective. In a way, downloading some games from the website is already at a point where it is annoying enough for a couple of us to prefer to use the app (e.g. me).

Though, if Heroic launcher had the option to download GOG installers instead of just the game, I would much prefer to use their app instead. It is still a launcher, but stripped to the bare essentials (no ads, no log-ins unless downloading etc).

Yep, there is none. They can only entice people to use Galaxy for some features. Or the more practical application: entice devs to join up while minimizing the hassle of having to remove Steam's tentacles from your game. Worst they have gotten is package Galaxy itself in the installers, that was backtracked pretty quickly.

But they've got zero incentive to force website users into the Galaxy. It'll only be doomsday and bad press. Unlike Steam which built its audience through Stockholm Syndrome, GOG actually built theirs with goodwill. A move like that is like detonating a nuclear bomb on yourself - not wise and it kills you. Steam can do whatever it wants because clueless people will always claim it saved PC games from uhhhhh, capitalist robot dragons? GOG doesn't have that charisma nor persuasion, so GOG will shoo away its users which means the devs they enticed with Galaxy will have less of a reason to bother.

First, as others have pointed out, they never actually said that, but more imprtantly, do you seriously believe Valve, in a hypothetical bankrupt/shutting down state, would actually give two shits about removing DRM? Moreover, even if they somehow really did want to, do you really think they could just snap their fingers and do it, whether the myriad of publishers on Steam agree to it or not?

This scenario is as realistic as Superman IV's "I'll get rid of all the nukes and we'll have world peace".