mind this is an unofficial FAQ, I am not a gog employee nor do I have access to any insider knowledge
alt3rn1ty: Q1. Can we completely disable the "Your Friends", so that it does not take up screen space, and there are no potential privacy / behaviour gathering / security issues ? .. And if we can will that also prevent other users tracking me in any way (online status etcetera) ?
Do not see were it takes up space in the application (except one entry in the list), but my guess is: no.
What issues are you concerned about ? You can control what other gog users can see by changing the settings in your profile on gogs website. But you will always give gog information about your beahvour as the games in your library will
always be installed from gogs server, not from a local drive/folder/repository.
alt3rn1ty: Q2. Can we also disable the Cloud Syncing (before it starts syncing
presumably by default after it auto updates the current GOG Galaxy) ?
At least currently, its only possible to deactive cloud saves, but your library is always synced with gogs servers
alt3rn1ty: Q3. Will there be any in your face advertising of games "You may be interested in .." netflix / steam style in your new client ?, and if so can we disable them ?
No clue what the future holds, but for me this looks like a far stretch for gog. But you already have that somewhat in the "recent" screen that will show you what other players play currently, but its definately not "in your face" and you can just ignore that screen, by changing the "start screen" setting.
alt3rn1ty: Q4. Will we be able to install it in a path of our choosing (ie not on the system drive, but for example on a different partition of the hard drive) ?
Thats already the case
alt3rn1ty: Q5. When GOG Galaxy 2 goes live (out of beta), and it updates the current GOG Galaxy, will the new EULA be presented for reading before it installs ?
No clue, how exactly it will be handled, but they are legally bound to make you aware of the changes in the clients EULA.
alt3rn1ty: Q6. On this page
https://www.gogalaxy.com/en/ in the "Your Privacy" section, you state .. "No Spying -
We'll never share your data with third parties". But then in the FAQ near the end of the same site, the question "I'm a GOG.COM user, whats new for me in GOG Galaxy 2.0?", and in the answer given you say "All features for
third party platforms work for GOG.COM" - Is that a contradiction, or does it just need to be explained better ?
No, gog will aggregate data through their client - depending on your privacy settings and usage of the client the amount of data will change - e.g. if you use the Microsoft integration gog will know what games you own on xboxlive, if you activated game time tracking, they will know that too, etc. This data, that they aggregate themselves, will (according to this statement) not be shared with anyone - e.g. if you connect Galaxy with your xbox/live account, Microsoft won't suddently know whats in your gog library, or with whom you are interacting via gog services. But third parties will know when you do something using their services - if your start a game that is in your "xboxlive-pc" library MS will know.
DerBesserwisser: Unless its one of the rather few titles on Steam that is DRM-free, yes you will need the steam client as GOG can't just annul Steams DRM
Storknest: I guess this is also true about programs you get through launchers like Origin and UPlay.
Odd that they advertise Galaxy 2.0 as the 'one launcher to bind them all' as if you never need another again but the reality is you do.
Well, in my mind thats a combination of three factors:
- marketing speech: they want their own client to be more attractive
- what we call around here "betriebsblind": as drm-free is their usp, their are constantly aware that drm is a thing, while most people don't care/think about it, so they don't make the connection in their head that they can't just use another client.
- people not reading about what they are getting into, even if it is explained in a simply worded and short FAQ