GOG.com

[biffthestiff]

I don't understand the people bitching about Galaxy. I use both Galaxy and Steam, to install and launch games. What are Galaxy's shortcomings, exactly? It's just a more convenient way to 1-click download and install your games. If anything it's better than Steam because I can actually turn off auto-updates on select games (makes sure I can resume my modded game any time), and it always works without requiring me to be online (unlike Steam offline mode which refuses to work after a few hours).

Are you guys using it as a social media client or something? I know it has features like overlay and screenshot management but I don't believe in that stupid zoomer nonsense.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

What are Galaxy's shortcomings, exactly?

It's a poorly coded piece of shit.
I have never been able to upgrade the galaxy application. Every time it auto updates, shots itself and crashes, so I have to redownload the new version, install, update all the goddamn settings one more time and then play games till the next time it gets banjaxed. It downloads like shit, suddenly dropping whatever it was doing and picking it up again like a senile gaffer at the soccer match. It's a pain to work with in general.

 

[Lacrymas]

Galaxy is the same shit as Steam, but some advertised features don't work. Like the shuffle thing that suggests random games from your inventory. It isn't random, it always suggests the same games in the same order. Galaxy doesn't support multiplayer features and cross-game compatibilities with a lot of games (Spellforce 3 f.e.), some games don't have achievement support either. It also doesn't do anything that Steam doesn't do. I want to be able to filter my games based on language, but neither Galaxy nor Steam have this feature. And like ERYFKRAD mentioned, it's just poorly coded and runs like ass, with multiple unavoidable bugs that keep cropping up every time it's updated. It doesn't feature mod support of any kind, unlike Steam's workshop, so you always have to manually mod all your GOG games. Honestly, the list of stuff it does well is limited to easily installing your GOG games, that's it.

 

[NecroLord]

Quality polish coding, huh?

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Galaxy has gotten better but it's clunky still. At elast you don't get as many broken downloads as you used to. Development on it has been frozen for almost a decade now. I liked the older Galaxy better, but that got thrown away ages ago.

 

[biffthestiff]

Maybe it's because I started playing PC games before Steam became a monopoly, but I don't care about any of those issues. Mods are the only feature mentioned so far that I even remotely give a fuck about, and integrating it into Galaxy would add nothing that Nexus doesn't already do. In fact having the mod tied to the launcher is a bigger issue, specifically Steam modding is an issue, because it makes amateur mod developers not publish their mods on Nexus. I wish all mods were on vendor-neutral sites.

What's the deal with achievements, why do so many people care about Galaxy not having them? I always thought of it as abuse of OCD autists ("spend 200 hours more on this game you already finished so you can see '100%' on your progress screen), I'm surprised the sort of people who hang out on a forum for boomer games even care.

 

[Lacrymas]

We are just listing the differences between Galaxy and Steam. I care about achievements in the sense that sometimes they provide a challenge you wouldn't otherwise come up with. Mod support is whatever, but it is convenient to mod your games by just clicking a single button. Galaxy could be connected to Nexus for mod support f.e.

 

[Lord_Potato]

I use Galaxy to merge all my games from different sources (GOG, Steam, Epic, Ubi, Origins, Amazon, Game Pass) into one gallery where I can see and access all of them. It's simply the most elegant way of managing my collection.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I wasn't aware you could merge all games into Galaxy from those other sources. Even though I buy a lot from GOG, I just don't use Galaxy. I've used steam on an older computer. The only games I bitched about for offline was 3rd party like Ubisoft. I couldn't play MMX offline and that is an issue. I hate 3rd party online tethering.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Workshop integrations make it too convenient imo. It's been added to older games like Gothic. Also a lot of OG users complain when achievements are not brought into GOG versions of the games too because it's a sign of devs simply not caring as much. If you don't have achievements, it probably means you'll miss out on a ton of stuff too, and gog users do keep a list of games with less patches and features.

It's worth mentioning that The Witcher 2 lacked achievments for Galaxy for the longest time too...

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

When GoG omits manuals, maps, and various "goodies" from boxes and also sells OSTS and shit as separate expensive packages, I get annoyed. Hell, i might just pirate osts off of youtube or elsewhere if i "must have." No manuals from old school or shit quality pdfs sucks.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

A lot of the user manuals from older releases were provided by GOG users themselves, though. When GOG was still a community.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

Maybe it's because I started playing PC games before Steam became a monopoly, but I don't care about any of those issues. Mods are the only feature mentioned so far that I even remotely give a fuck about, and integrating it into Galaxy would add nothing that Nexus doesn't already do. In fact having the mod tied to the launcher is a bigger issue, specifically Steam modding is an issue, because it makes amateur mod developers not publish their mods on Nexus. I wish all mods were on vendor-neutral sites.

What's the deal with achievements, why do so many people care about Galaxy not having them? I always thought of it as abuse of OCD autists ("spend 200 hours more on this game you already finished so you can see '100%' on your progress screen), I'm surprised the sort of people who hang out on a forum for boomer games even care.

Same here. When "achievements" first came up I thought they were an ridiculous and retarded idea, that wouldn't stick. To this day I don't understand what they do for people. I like that GOG Galaxy lets me deactivate pop-ups and achievements, which was not possible in Steam the last time I tried it. But that was some ~15 years ago. Has this changed nowadays?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I still contribute the best i can to the gog community but i just hate their forum. Its just bleck. Last game i tried to help with was uh. Meat Puppet.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Same here. When "achievements" first came up I thought they were an ridiculous and retarded idea, that wouldn't stick. To this day I don't understand what they do for people. I like that GOG Galaxy lets me deactivate pop-ups and achievements, which was not possible in Steam the last time I tried it. But that was some ~15 years ago. Has this changed nowadays?

Achievements is a bizarre example of gamification of the gaming process itself.

Instead of playing for the sheer pleasure or to simply beat the game some people play for the dopamine kick of collecting achievements.

There are even those that draw pride from 'striking platinium'. A particularly striking case of dopamine addiction, but okay, who am I to judge.

 

[Spukrian]

some games don't have achievement support either.

Most often this is on the developer, not caring enough about Gog customers to add achievements.

 

[racofer]

It's all about the offline installers. That's GOG's entire value. Everything else is just a "worse than steam" experience.

 

[-M-]

My biggest problems with Galaxy are that the Store page takes significantly longer to load than through a web browser, and also the Store home page lacks a search bar. You have to navigate to 'All Games' to find it.

I wish they would focus their efforts on fixing basic shit like this rather than trying to integrate every other storefront into theirs.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

They focus on that because the main argument against GOG is that you don't want to have your games all over the place. So them giving you the ability to connect your games to one single account is something CDPR wants as a main selling point for new customers. The issue here is that the quality of the service has been going down the drain and outside of offline installers there's not much else to the gog experience.

 

[El Presidente]

It's all about the offline installers. That's GOG's entire value. Everything else is just a "worse than steam" experience.

It's not just that, there's a few GOG-only must haves too. SMAC, the non-shitty (and complete) version of Heroes 3 and the M&M blobbers, Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom (no idea why is that, as all the other latest Impressions city builders are available on Steam). Though 3 might be the better game I'm a big fan of Caesar 2 as well and it's a GOG exclusive too.

If you're a Sierra fan, their Steam catalog is quite incomplete. Dagger of Amon Ra, Colonel's Bequest, Freddy Pharkas, Torin's Passage and a few others are GOG exclusives.

 

[Black_Willow]

Alright, I'm leaving to have fun.

And so he left

 

[Paladino]

It's all about the offline installers.

Yep, and that's all I need when I buy a game.

I'll never understand how so many people got dependent on these babysitting DRM schemes like Steam for gaming.

 

[ds]

My biggest problems with Galaxy are that the Store page takes significantly longer to load than through a web browser, and also the Store home page lacks a search bar. You have to navigate to 'All Games' to find it.

Why would you even want to use the store website in the client instead of a proper web browser? They (and Steam as well) should just make a lightweight client focused on downloading and updating games rather than pushing yet another consooomer app with an embedded copy of chrome with an inferior UI and no browser extensions. Or better yet provide an officially supported API and let others who know what they are doing make third-party clients.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

My biggest problems with Galaxy are that the Store page takes significantly longer to load than through a web browser, and also the Store home page lacks a search bar. You have to navigate to 'All Games' to find it.

Why would you even want to use the store website in the client instead of a proper web browser? They (and Steam as well) should just make a lightweight client focused on downloading and updating games rather than pushing yet another consooomer app with an embedded copy of chrome with an inferior UI and no browser extensions. Or better yet provide an officially supported API and let others who know what they are doing make third-party clients.

They already had that, but the public voted for a client, and said client also helped to smooth things out when it came to getting more games in the platform.
Also, some people have argued that they've drastically capped download speeds via the browser, directly, as opposed to Galaxy.

 

[biffthestiff]

Also, some people have argued that they've drastically capped download speeds via the browser, directly, as opposed to Galaxy.

If they did, I don't blame them. It's CURRENT YEAR and web browsers still don't have reliable resume! If you're serving a multi-GB file, you want people using the desktop client so that if the download is interrupted, you don't waste GBs of bandwidth (which costs money) when people restart the download.