GOG.com

[Endemic]

https://af.gog.com/promo/steel_division_sale?as=1649904300

66% off on Steel Division 2, including the complete edition. Separate DLCs are 50% off.

 

[Removal]

https://af.gog.com/game/tank_warfare_tunisia_1943?as=1649904300
Looks like Graviteam is coming to gog

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Release:
Starcom: Nexus
https://af.gog.com/game/starcomnexus?as=1649904300

 

[racofer]

Something for the Galaxy 2.0 users in here to consider:

https://af.gog.com/forum/general/telemetry_in_gog_galaxy_20?as=1649904300

Hey,

I had a peek behind the scenes of the Galaxy client again and noticed an awful lot of requests to an insights-collector.gog.com domain. So I played around with the client for some time to see what kind of insights GOG is collecting. Here's a quick list of the events that were transmitted, loosely in the order that I triggered them:

• When the client is launched
• When you successfully log in
• When you open/focus the client window
• When you unfocus the client window
• When you minimize the client window
• When you view your activity feed
• When you view a game
• When you switch tabs (Overview, My progress, Extras) in the game view
• When you view your friend list
• When you view a friend's profile
• When you view your library
• When you click the install button on a game
• When you look at the currently downloads
• When you open the store
• When a game finished downloading including how long it took
• When you open a store page
• When a game is installed
• When you open the settings
• When you switch settings tabs
• When you change a setting
• When you click the menu option to file a bug report
• When you open the search
• When you click on a search result
• When you filter the library
• When you clear library filters

All of these actions are sent to GOG as soon as they are triggered along with a second-accuracy timestamp and the currently logged in user. In summary there's very little you can do in the Galaxy client without GOG knowing exactly what you did.

Now, is this a reason for concern? Maybe. There is nothing in the transmitted data that couldn't also be collected from using the website. It's also very unlikely that this stream of events would reveal anything personal about you. It's still a bit unsettling, to me at least, that Galaxy users are tracked so closely and without any attempt at anonymization. I have no problem with GOG having the technical ability to look at who I chat with and whose profiles I visit, but to know that they actually feed that data into their analytics... that's just a little bit creepy. There's surely a use to some level of telemetry, but this seems quite far away from the amount required to ensure a good user experience, especially when there are more than enough people who voluntarily give their opinions on what needs improvement.

What I can say for sure is that all the privacy focused marketing from GOG is quite dishonest. Galaxy has not been designed with privacy in mind. The people still downloading their games manually and launching them without any clients in between do have at least one more reason to do so. I'm also going to be requesting another personal data dump from GOG according to GDPR to see if there is anything interesting in it that they're honest about collecting.

To all the regular angry forum people, please keep the comments on topic. This thread is about Telemetry in Galaxy and not how much you hate everything about the client and love manual downloads.

 

[Catacombs]

Something for the Galaxy 2.0 users in here to consider:

A possible solution is using something like Little Snitch (I don't know the Windows alternative off the top of my head) to block outgoing connects to the collector.gog.com domain.

 

[lukaszek]

standard telemetry to understand which features are used and how? How do you expect a company to improve without such data?

 

[Catacombs]

How do you expect a company to improve without such data?

And you can't just let all that user data sit in storage! That's millions and millions of extra złoty the data brokers would happily cough over.

 

[mck]

Randomly remembering when CD Projekt was threatening people with legal action for pirating The Witcher and having a way of knowing if you pirated their DRM-free installer or not

 

[Bad Sector]

That's millions and millions of extra złoty the data brokers would happily cough over

None of the information in that list is helpful for data brokers, they aren't even useful for profiling - which would be pointless in this case because they have your actual user account anyway. This is only relevant for GOG to see which parts of the application get any use.

(which is also pointless, like all telemetry-driven "design" because it is essentially an automated way to make the question that supposedly Ford mentioned at some point about if he asked what people wanted they'd tell him they wanted faster horses, but that is another topic)

 

[lukaszek]

its not just about design but finding bugs too.
Why certain page gets lots of view but no downloads? Why downloads for that one game take forever? Those things are being found in automated way, not by waiting for users to report

 

[racofer]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Bad Sector]

its not just about design but finding bugs too.
Why certain page gets lots of view but no downloads? Why downloads for that one game take forever? Those things are being found in automated way, not by waiting for users to report

Having a QA department helps more here without relying on telemetry. All telemetry can tell you is if there was a failure and often that will be also recorded in your server's logs anyway.

In any case i was referring explicitly to using telemetry for design decisions, not for bugs. It can be useful for bugs but so does having a QA department.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Release:
Field of Glory II: Medieval
https://af.gog.com/game/field_of_glory_ii_medieval?as=1649904300

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Gogcucks outdoing themselves again: https://www.huniepot.com/post/642236167309459456/huniepop-2-release-faq

Will it be censored?

The game will be fully uncensored (with an option to censor if you wish) on all stores with the exception of GOG. I still encourage players to purchase from GOG if that’s where they like to play games, because the censored version can be uncensored pretty easily with an external patch (explained below).

Yes, folks! Gog is the only storefront to go out of its way to sell its customers a censored version.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Only little kids would play something like that so it makes sense, really.

 

[Ismaul]

Little kids wanting such a game are crafty enough to apply the uncensor patch on the devs' own website lol.

GOG's censorship achieves nothing but out them as prudes. But really, why the fuck are they even censoring, after The Witcher sex cards and scenes? Makes no sense...

 

[Dayyālu]

https://af.gog.com/game/tank_warfare_tunisia_1943?as=1649904300
Looks like Graviteam is coming to gog

As a man that loved Operation Star despite clunky, how's this one?

I'm quite offended by the lack of Italians and the usual suspects in focus, but Graviteam usually throws out quality products. And this was for the longest time 40 bucks on Steam.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Little kids wanting such a game are crafty enough to apply the uncensor patch on the devs' own website lol.

GOG's censorship achieves nothing but out them as prudes. But really, why the fuck are they even censoring, after The Witcher sex cards and scenes? Makes no sense...

Because witcher games are for early teens while chinese cartoons are for kids.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Gog has spicy anime games like this and they just give a warning on the store page about mature content. The fact that the censored version of Huniepop 2 is something you *opt in* for the other stores makes me think GOG just can't be bothered to offer the "censorship DLC" as an optional download, so they offer the game with the censorship patch applied and leave it to you to remove it.

source: my ass, but it makes more sense to me than random censorship no one else is enforcing

edit: an alternative is that they don't want to deal with this again

Controversy

When first introduced in the Hunie Direct - Aug 2018 video, Polly was confirmed to be a transgender woman who had not fully transitioned. There was a mixed response to this announcement within hours of the video's upload prompting HunieDev to start a strawpoll for adding an option ingame to finish the game without a sexual encounter with Polly. The results were almost completely cut in half with two-fifths preferring to have this feature added. In a later tweet, HunieDev announced that instead of adding said option, they would add a feature to allow the player to choose Polly's gender either as a transgender female or female at birth stating that while they could not please everyone, having the player choose would be the best way to make most people happy. This too, was met with polarizing opinions to the point where HunieDev has recinded the use of the term transgender and has opted for the terms "female" and "female with male genitals" as a way to avoid using any specific terminology.

 

[Endemic]

That's nothing new. Other "anime" games on the store have the censored versions with nudity removed since at least 2015. Maybe with a nudge-nudge wink-wink in a forum post saying you can patch them at your discretion.

In the case of Witcher 1, I definitely recall the cards being controversial and being censored in at least North America initially (later reversed by the Director's Cut).

 

[ERYFKRAD]

later reversed by the Director's Cut

Thankfully the modesty mod exists.

 

[Removal]

As a man that loved Operation Star despite clunky, how's this one?

I'm quite offended by the lack of Italians and the usual suspects in focus, but Graviteam usually throws out quality products. And this was for the longest time 40 bucks on Steam.

It's derived from the Mius Front engine, so it runs smoother and the radial command menu is much easier to grasp imo
The only major downside to Tank Warfare is the relative lack of operations compared to Op Star and Mius Front. I thought the British operation DLCs were pretty fun and generally beat out some of the American ones

 

[Nijar]

Huniepop 2, best game of the month! Codex game of the month!

 

[Danikas]

https://af.gog.com/promo/thief_sale?as=1649904300

You can get thief trilogy for 2 dollars.

 

[catfood]

Huniepop 2, best game of the month! Codex game of the month!

It features a tranny so it's bound to be a Codex favorite.