Trying to get Grim Dawn to work properly, when I found this file. It's even mentioned on Crates forums.
But.... I don't use galaxy. I have a full clean install of the game because it's bugging out.

Why is this installed via the standalone downloads?

It's not just Grim Dawn either.
A quick search of gog games installed show Grim Dawn, Shadow Warrior2, INSIDE, Dex, Dying Light have it installed.

Could (sort of, but not really...) understand if it's something to do with games that have co-op, but two of those don't & as I stated, I don't even use galaxy.


/confused.

its probably incase you start using galaxy it doesnt have to install galaxy components by itself.

When a program is built, it is linked against all of the libraries that it uses. All of the libraries a program uses must be present on the system in order for the operating system's dynamic loader to resolve the symbols present in the executable. This is how dynamic linking works on all modern operating systems for 25+ years more or less.

This means that every library a program uses or can use, absolutely must be installed and in the path where the dynamic link loader can find it when the executable is started. It makes no difference whether or not the program actually uses that library once it has loaded, but it must be present on the system when the OS attempts to load the DLL or you will get an error generated by Windows that a DLL is missing.

In the case where a program has optional functionality present in it to which one is not using at the time (or ever for that matter), the DLL file must still be present on the system.

So it basically makes no difference whether someone is using the Galaxy client or not or any Galaxy related services. It is an operating system software technical requirement that these DLL files be present in order to load the software. On Windows they're .DLL files, on Linux they're .so files, not sure on Mac or other OSs, but it's the same concept.

If you're not using that functionality, don't worry about it - it's just sitting there doing nothing unless you optionally decide to use the functionality provided by the game to be able to use Galaxy's services, which depending on the specific game can potentially include multiplayer matchmaking, achievements, game time tracking, the Galaxy overlay, and any other present or future features that GOG may add to the Galaxy platform.

Hope this helps.