I was just looking at the library of games I have purchased on GOG, and for some of my games there is a little blue dot to the left of the game titles. What does this dot mean? At first I thought it was to show what games I have not installed or not yet played, but apparently that is not the case.

New version update.

Sometimes GOG put a blue dot for games that have updates.
The problem is, they often forgot to do this.

Lately, the blue dot seems to mean "hey, there's a new update for this game, even though there's actually not, you already downloaded the update a month ago, but we thought we'd just activate the blue dot again anyway for no reason".

Any changes are considered an update. Look at the changelog where it's available to see if the update matters to you, I.e. a lot have structural changes, or language additions, or platform updates, which you may not need. What is highly annoying is when a game doesn't have a changelog - happens a fair bit, or even worse, when they are not marked as updated at all - dying light is an example of this, lots of updates not marked as updates.
Truth is it's never going to be fixed, use the optional galaxy client if you want a more comprehensive system as offline is really second or maybe third class now.

To expand upon what others have said: the blue dot shows (sometimes incorrectly) that there has been an update for the indicated game; you can check that game's changelog in your library to see if there were any changes relevant to you (sometimes it's just installer changes, rather than game changes; other times, it might be changes that only affect builds for other operating systems, or the addition of localizations for languages you don't speak; in these cases, you can save yourself a download).
You can filter your library for games that currently have a blue dot by clicking "My collection" (just above the top shelf in your library on the website; not sure how or if you can do it in Galaxy) and selecting "Updated".

Be aware that any game you click on in your library will have both the "NEW" label and the blue "updated" dot removed. Because of this, I would advise that you only click on titles with the update dot when you're prepared to actually download the new files, if necessary -- or just create a custom tag called something like "undownloaded update", "update pending" or something similar, to remind you that your installation and/or backup of a given title is out of date. :)

This is especially problematic when an "update" can be something like adding a German language manual or something, which isn't even a game file. Or then it can be the updated game version that fixes game breaking bugs, or a brand new Linux version or whatever.

Just looking at that blue dot doesn't tell anything about the update, and if there's no changelog, then it's really just a guessing game. At least these days file names give some indication about file versions, back in the early days files were named just after game names, and there wasn't even a theoretical way of knowing which file version was available for download.



Nice to see you back ;-)