Do you like them? Don't care? Hate them? I'm curious about what the average GOG user thinks about them.

I personally like them. I don't consider them necessary, but I always like it when a game on GOG lists them as one of its features. Although in the end, I'll always buy a game here over Steam regardless of achievement support.

I'm not even close to a trophy collector, nor do I care about getting all trophies for 99% of games, But I do like the slight sense of accomplishment I get from obtaining them randomly throughout a playthrough. In some sense, I feel like it kind of adds to the legitimacy of the games I purchase on GOG. There's proof I was here, and I played that game, and got X amount of trophies on it. Absolutely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but it'll feel kinda nice for reminiscing good old times in a few years.

And by the way, are there any known GOG achievement collectors around, kinda like there are for PlayStation?

I have no strong feelings one way or the other...

I love it when games have achievements if i adore a game it's just another reason to play it longer

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/competition_most_achievements_in_june_2023

highly addictive feature, I was on it for some time, some people are real long-distance runners, me more like.... sprinter xD after 1000 it started to be repetitive.... I can see a chance of coming back to it and Galaxy when offered "achievements reset option (1204)" that could boost the replayability of many games
best wishes!

I used to be neutral towards them until they became the #1 reason behind ongoing degradation of offline installers, ie, GOG want Galaxy achievements but developers made it clear they don't want to recode SteamWorks achievements into Galaxy Achievements for every store, so GOG had the "Great Idea (tm)" of simply selling Steam games with SteamWorks achievements & API intact, inside a buggy as hell Galaxy 'ghost wrapper' (glorified Steam emulator crack) to translate Steam achievements into Galaxy ones on the fly, stamp a GOG logo on top and pretend it's a "GOG" release... The end result is we now have "GOG" games that require Steam cracks to startup normally without the "offline installers now hang an extra +15s on startup waiting for a fake Galaxy emulator wrapper to talk to a fake Steam emulator running inside that wrapper" delay (vs the clean & client-less builds we used to get) and this whole absurdly convoluted 'barely DRM-Free' mess is solely due to "Galaxy achievements on the cheap"...

It ranges from I don't care!

As in they are just fake pictures (seriously, if a game has achievements they can usually be accessed from an in-game menu) attached to a third party client as an afterthought, and the only value they have is the quantitative data collected and send to the developers that determines how lazy they can be on their next game.

To I hate them!

As in they are an unnecessary bloat file in the offline installers that YOU CAN'T EVEN ACCESS without a client at best and a malware that can cause a CTD at worst!

Usually they are just unnecessary crap added much later that have no place in the offline installers!
Oh and let's not forget that they are also a marketing scheme, making use of FOMO tactics!
You see newly released DLCs usually come with their own achievements and "completionists" (suckers) will usually be buying whatever the developers dish out regardless of quality just to get that 100%

I remember the good old days, when you unlocked exclusive skins or bonus content when completing in-game tasks, now those were real achievements (and all that without a client bloat!).

Personally, I like them simply for the fact that they are an additional perk for our games. If a game doesn’t have achievements, it doesn’t take away any value or mean any less to me, and if it does have achievements, I will enjoy earning them just as well. Overall, I really don’t care about achievements one way or another, but if they have them, I’d consider it a plus.

I like that game has achievements and I wish GOG had more support for them as I attend some groups with challenges regarding game achievements.

I appreciate the route GOG has gone with, even if it isn't perfect: they are trying to get the best of both worlds. Steam-like features, while keeping offline installers intact (mostly, but not always the case as you pointed out).

It's all the byproduct of unfortunate circumstances in which GOG, to attempt to compete with Steam, has to try to cater to their audience, which has been educated to disregard ownership of the product they pay for, and would rather have a cute little profile full of colors and animations rather than keeping their games forever. It's a tough crowd unfortunately, and doesn't look like it'll get better anytime soon.

Your criticism is absolutely valid, and the cases you point out are pretty bad. Waiting 10 times more for a game to boot up is horrendous. But I wouldn't say it's the #1 thing killing offline installers. For me, that would still be the poor compression and slow install speeds. Offline installers are most times the same size as the installed game. I have about 100 offline installers on a 1TB HDD. If they hypothetically managed to reduce offline installer size by 20% on average, I could fit around 20 more games on that HDD. That's a lot at the end of the day, and storage isn't cheap.

If some pirate running his compression setup on his mother's attic can get a much better compression ratio, it disappoints me that a proper company like GOG can't.

You stole the words from my mouth.

Achievements are usually an anti-feature. More often than not, a game is better without them.

Even though I agree that companies will do their best to be as lazy as possible, I confess I don't see how that is caused by the existence of achievements?

And as for bloat, unless it actually has a negative effect like you mentioned with crashes, is a way overblown issue in my opinion. Sure, it might not be as pretty, but that extra bloat adds virtually nothing to the game's size, and normally doesn't affect offline installers, except in the cases mentioned. Mostly how I feel about them, yeah.

Simple, achievements are tactically placed at specific stages of the game progress or for performing mundane tasks. If for example act/stage one or dungeon one is completed by 90% - 70% of players only <10% might actually finish the game or unlock rare achievements. Meaning they really don't have to bother with polishing or even completing game development since only a neglectable % will see the end.

Achievements provide that information! Since they are placed there for progress tracking. That pat on the back you get might provide more info to the developers than you think.

Same as AB2012, I really didn't care all the time I could ignore them. But then they started enshitifying offline installers with the "Ghost Wrapper" garbage (aka "Here at GOG we now sell literal pre-cracked Steam games (sorry, I meant 'ghost wrapped' "GOG" versions"...), and now I actively despise the huge negative impact they've had on this store's formerly great offline installers and have cut way back on purchases here since. If anyone thinks that's hyperbole, read this for another real life example.

Even ignoring all this wrapper garbage, half of "achieve"ments in general, eg, Baldur's Gate "Achievement Unlocked: You left the 10min long tutorial area!" are just obvious "backdoor telemetry"...

I don't care much for them, but it's nice that achievements exists for those that do. It's fun to achieve things, and to be rewarded for that within the game.

An old game that does it is F-Zero GX: unlocking some machines and courses requires beating challenges on the harder difficulties - alongside the other machines which are all purchased with tokens awarded for completing other tasks, with more tokens for harder ones. Just seeing a screenshot of the machine selection or track selection page is enough to demonstrate one's skill.
A newer example might be Into the Breach, which interweaves the more modern achievement style in to my liking. Complete things in the game, get a badge saying you did so and use that as a means to unlock additional machines.

This is what I would like to say, if they were truly innocuous; just a fun and properly executed addition that's baked into the game naturally. Achievements have always been, to some degree, part accomplishment and personal achievement, part showing off to people that you did something hard. It has become far too much showing off, and especially broadcasting that to the world. And I don't like braggarts, or being compelled to be some ostentatious fop. It's gotten to the point where some fools refuse to play a game without them, and cannot enjoy it if they are absent. This I don't understand. Seemingly every game has to have them now, and this is annoying. It doesn't make sense in every game.
AB2012 and 00063 already expanded on the other potential dangers of combining an achievement system that requires internet access with offline installers.

I didn't think about that honestly. It's an interesting perspective, but I can't really say that I think it really applies, at least not right now. Cyberpunk's disastrous launch had a pretty good impact on the industry concerning unfinished games, and I can't really remember too many unfinished games on launch day since the current gen of consoles launched. The majority of console physical copies are fully playable directly from disc too, which is a good sign.

Normally, if games are unfinished, you can tell right from the beginning. The only game I can recall being a mess at launch in recent times is Atomic Heart, but I'm sure there were others.
I 100% agree with you here. It's not a big deal at all if there are no achievements. And some games have achievements slapped on them without any love behind it which overall just makes the experience less nicer too. But if done properly, it's pretty nice