jDr0id: It's very hard to stay grounded in this business. I believe Galaxy is an attempt at modernizing GOG that turned out great. Before the recent new website fiasco, I would only use Galaxy at home... I would never even touch the website except when I would open a ton of game tabs from Galaxy.

They want you to use it for various reasons which I assume are along the lines of:

Telemetry. It helps focus attention where it's deserved.
Transitions made easy. If you tell a die-hard Steam fan to give up his "ease of use" for 1990's habits of downloading files then installing them, your battle is already lost for the vast majority of them.
Image. It's a great way to help influence buyers and sellers that GOG means business.

And the most crucial one in my opinion, and it's exactly what they've been doing from the beginning, providing us with what we want, a DRM-Free experience. For those interested, they get an amazing platform for their digital libraries. Granted there's a lot of things I would change on Galaxy or do differently, but in my opinion it's a fine product as it is.

You may not like Galaxy and that is fine, but linking this to a way to move into "DRM" is absolutely absurd. The only tangible goal I can imagine in that regard is they could be trying to bring multiplayer to GOG and Galaxy could be the answer to that. And for all I care, as long as my games remain available & playable outside of Galaxy and with DRM-Free backup installers etc. I have no reason to complain.

Moving into DRM would ring the end of times for GOG as they simply can't compete in that market. They are comfortable where they are. Now if you were at the head of GOG, how would you plan things moving forward? Business is not a stationary journey, you need to adapt and evolve constantly if you wish to remain relevant. Look at the hit Microsoft got recently, they had to embrace developers and Linux to slow down the crash. Or look at Intel's current condition. It's too easy to make mistakes, very hard to excel.

So long that whatever they do keeps things open and consumer oriented, I will always support them.

Whatever... my 2 cents... sue me!

jDr0id: It's very hard to stay grounded in this business. I believe Galaxy is an attempt at modernizing GOG that turned out great. Before the recent new website fiasco, I would only use Galaxy at home... I would never even touch the website except when I would open a ton of game tabs from Galaxy.

They want you to use it for various reasons which I assume are along the lines of:

Telemetry. It helps focus attention where it's deserved.
Transitions made easy. If you tell a die-hard Steam fan to give up his "ease of use" for 1990's habits of downloading files then installing them, your battle is already lost for the vast majority of them.
Image. It's a great way to help influence buyers and sellers that GOG means business.

And the most crucial one in my opinion, and it's exactly what they've been doing from the beginning, providing us with what we want, a DRM-Free experience. For those interested, they get an amazing platform for their digital libraries. Granted there's a lot of things I would change on Galaxy or do differently, but in my opinion it's a fine product as it is.

You may not like Galaxy and that is fine, but linking this to a way to move into "DRM" is absolutely absurd. The only tangible goal I can imagine in that regard is they could be trying to bring multiplayer to GOG and Galaxy could be the answer to that. And for all I care, as long as my games remain available & playable outside of Galaxy and with DRM-Free backup installers etc. I have no reason to complain.

Moving into DRM would ring the end of times for GOG as they simply can't compete in that market. They are comfortable where they are. Now if you were at the head of GOG, how would you plan things moving forward? Business is not a stationary journey, you need to adapt and evolve constantly if you wish to remain relevant. Look at the hit Microsoft got recently, they had to embrace developers and Linux to slow down the crash. Or look at Intel's current condition. It's too easy to make mistakes, very hard to excel.

So long that whatever they do keeps things open and consumer oriented, I will always support them.

Whatever... my 2 cents... sue me!

Fender_178: I doubt that GOG would remove the DRM-Free installers because they believe in the user owning their games. Also DRM-Free is GOG's bread and butter. If they were to go away from that it wouldn't end well for them. Plus it wouldn't be a wise idea to for them to go that route.

john_hatcher: Normally I would totally agree with you, but seeing what happened to other principles like „one world, one price“, I can understand the thought of tfishell. Just have a laugh at https://youtu.be/nRdfYwvGTos

Fender_178: I doubt that GOG would remove the DRM-Free installers because they believe in the user owning their games. Also DRM-Free is GOG's bread and butter. If they were to go away from that it wouldn't end well for them. Plus it wouldn't be a wise idea to for them to go that route.

park_84: They've been creating a brand around the DRM-free for 10 years, of everything they can change this is what I would least expect them to modify, it wouldn't make much sense from a business perspective.

tfishell: EDIT: I apologize for the unfair title, I think Linko should edit it accordingly. I should have just focused on the importance of keeping DRM-free installers

(*I have no real evidence of this, I'm just suggesting it in part because of the Galaxy push.)

This thread isn't really necessary but I wanted to point out that, when trying to sell somebody on using GOG, when they don't want to have to install *yet another client* like Steam, Origin, uPlay, etc., it can be the difference between sale and no sale when they learn that they aren't forced to download *yet another client* (at least for single-player) and can just get the installer files and run the game via the old-school exe.

Caesar.: I have seen people predicting the end of offline installers and Galaxy becoming mandatory for almost two years. It hasn't happened yet and it's not going to happen (unless they want to lose their client base, which I guess they don't). DRM-free is GOG's main selling point, after all.

mk47at: If they believed in owning the games, why did they change the “owned” labels to “in library” on the game pages?

mk47at: If they believed in owning the games, why did they change the “owned” labels to “in library” on the game pages?

Leroux: ...to a point where they think it's better to hide the DRM-free installers so as not to confuse anyone and distract them from installing Galaxy. :P.