Another example that leaves me puzzled is stardew valley. They have what they call a "LAN mode" but evidently you're free to enter any IP address and it'll happily try to connect. However, they don't tell you the port, nor do they let you change it. I'm not going to assume malice just yet but I wouldn't be surprised if the option to see & change the port never showed up in the final release. Thus they want to steer / force people into the online mode that is tied to Steam / GOG accounts. Interestingly, that mode has had plenty of issues and people have had a better experience using the "LAN mode" for internet play. *sigh*

This evidently has now changed. When downloading GOG games, Galaxy now appears as the first option (as a giant blue button) and below that and much smaller, the classic installers have since been renamed "Offline Backup Game Installers"... Yuck!

It seems GOG really does want everyone to use Galaxy.

I agree with you that I should be able to choose the classic/offline as my default settings. But in the meantime, I just used my Adblock Element Hiding filter to make the giant blue button disappear! Haha!

So my sister tried it the other day as we wanted to see how the Stardew Valley beta works.

What a disaster. Galaxy would fail at the very end of the game's installation with a "configuration error" or something like that. The game files were already there, but Galaxy wouldn't let you choose what version to install before it thinks the game is properly installed at least once.

Needless to say, she uninstalled Galaxy right afterwards. We're now playing SdV with the (already outdated) Linux beta build.

I really hate that GOG is pushing this broken crap. And I really hate that game devs / publishers are trying to force us to use it by tying functionality (such as multiplayer) to the clients..

Most consumers like and want client/social functionality. GOG had to respond and go for it if they wanted to expand their business to newer games, which they did. The only real alternative would have been sticking with "Good OLD Games," which I would have been fine with, but then you might never have gotten the DRM free indies you see here.

Anyway, is what it is, and since it requires a half-second of choosing which link to click I fail to see why people rage about it so much.