I suspect the redundant requests are primarily designed to weed out poisoned data served on otherwise valid URLs. I've also seen the redundant requests increase massively the more sources I blocked at the firewall level, so it feels like they're pre-emptively overcompensating for some percentage of requests being blocked.
My website contains ~6000 unique data points in effectively infinite combinations on effectively infinite pages. Some of those combinations are useful for humans, but the AI-scrapers could gain a near-infinite efficiency improvement by just identifying as a bot and heeding my robots.txt and/or rel="nofollow" hints to access the ~500 top level pages which contain close to everything which is unique. They just don't care. All their efficiency attempts are directed solely toward bypassing blocks. (Today I saw them varying the numbers in their user agent strings: X15 rather than X11, Chrome/532 rather than Chrome/132, and so on...)
If current behaviour is anything to go by, they will ignore all such assistance, and instead insist on crawling infinite variations of the same content accessed with slightly different URL-patterns, plus hallucinate endless variations of non-existent but plausible looking URLs to hit as well until the server burns down - all on the off-chance that they might see a new unique string of text which they can turn into a paperclip.
There are no games on GOG which require a PlayStation account for their single player gameplay. (AFAIK, but I think I'm pretty tuned in and would know.)
It was an early complaint about Horizon: Zero Dawn, especially but not uniquely, on GOG. Sony did walk that requirement back several months after the complaints started, but it wasn't directly because they thought they violated any of GOG's explicit policies, it seemed more directly due to the user complaints and review bombing on Steam from what I saw.
There are also a handful of games which put some additional purely cosmetic content behind an online check. That could be the start of a slippery slope, which people are justly upset about, but they then do an injustice to their cause by generalizing from those cases.
It's not a slippery slope but already full blown DRM plain and simple. Both online functionality limited to GOG-run servers and checks for cosmetic content.
Note that for Gloomhaven, the multiplayer server is one of the players' computers. That player hosts a game and everyone else joins. There are no GOG servers and no company servers.
In version 1.0 of the GOG release, multiplayer is enabled.
In subsequent versions, multiplayer is disabled (in the sense that the button to host or join a game is greyed out) unless the game succeeds at verifying you through Galaxy. (And this is a dynamic status; you can have it enabled, shut off Galaxy, restart the game, and find that it's disabled again.
Which ones? Honest question. I only remember games for which GOG apologizes in their store page for missing cosmetics or extra features because originally tied to online services (e.g. the Mafia or Yakuza games), or ones in which they are unlocked by default for the same reason (e.g. Dragon Age Origins).
I had Crime Cities lying around since it was a freebie on GOG many years ago, so I just went ahead and installed it using vanilla wine. There was absolutely no Galaxy requirement for installing or playing the single player part of the game.
Galaxy can be required for multiplayer aspects in games, but if what you say is true for the singleplayer part of the game, GOG will consider it a bug, and will get it fixed.
There's nothing in the Crime Cities GOG forum about this, nor in the various tracking threads in the main forum, and generally GOG users are extremely sensitive about anything which even reeks of forcing Galaxy, so I'd strongly expect any issue to be known.
I've seen cases where the developer implemented a bad online check, so that if you blocked the program from accessing the internet while the OS reported being online, the game would hang or crash, but being fully offline would work. Could it be that something like that was at play here? Oh, or that you simply picked the wrong installer for the game, and thus ran the Galaxy-installer rather than the offline installer?
I think too it can be misleading since on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE (which works entirely without Galaxy and how I run games).
They do this to push Galaxy for convenience I suppose as most are used to clients that handle updates but it can be confusing if some wonder why for instance their offline installer shortcut opened Galaxy instead.
If the wine experience is anything to go by, if you don't have Galaxy installed at all, the shortcuts will also just point to the .exe - but yeah, I suspect it must be something like this.
> on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE
Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)
They're not creating something new. They're taking their existing tool (which - for all its flaws - is still far ahead of Heroic in many ways), improving it further, and changing it to also work on Linux.
If they then go add additional features like wine integration to that tool to make it overlap more with Heroic is something we're all assuming, but not actually a given.
Linux userspace is defined by fragmentation. Linux users can't even unify on a distro, such that significant swathes of software are incompatible for some users despite everyone using the same kernel. In that environment, and also just in general, why is anybody obligated to contribute to a specific existing project rather than building their own?
As much as i hate the pointless Linux fragmentation, I think them going down the path of steam/heroic games launcher and releasing one appimage/.deb file and letting others take on the burden for their distros should do.
I mean, the main issue with portability is the insistance on dynamic linking, far more than the distro situation.
If you use Linux like MacOS and only run static binaries and containerized programs via things like flatpak everything is fine.
It's totally possible to treat the distro simply as a thin base layer and get everything else from flatpak and the various container hubs. It does work great.
Said absolutely nothing about obligation, raising the same decades-long observation. The users will see strife [and joy], considering Heroic does decently but this will be advantaged. That's it. Forgive me if I don't want to go over it again.
> Cheapshot: Good Old Games (as long as our proprietary software functions)
False. That's literally the point of GOG. You can download the games directly from their website, install them, and run them without running any GOG software. GOG could vanish tomorrow and you'd still be able to play every game you purchased, as long as you backed up their installers somewhere.
What would you prefer? I couldn't edit it now if I wanted. Is GOG, the business entity, here to defend itself? Set me straight? If so, I'd like to first express my appreciation for their efforts. Then... repeat my critical statements to them shortly after.
Oh to be private/not beholden to shareholders, open to build for a ~small~ growing target [that has largely managed without them]. I'm envious, really. We're looking at the next Valve, I tell you! All it will take is the one hire for this listing, a penguin, Bellevue, and Codeweavers.
Minus sarcasm: I understand their interests in this and how it might even be a net benefit for all. I won't say it will be free, Heroic users paying the toll. Oops, there I go being loose with words again.
The issue here is that this is an existing "standard", by the logic of the comic. I wouldn't be surprised if there were already unofficial Linux ports of this launcher to begin with.
Also, even if it was fragmentation I'd prefer competition to ensue. I don't want another Steam situation, even if in theory a launcher isn't holding any valuable data hostage.
Like I'm not aware and it's sunshine/rainbows, actually. Competition in the GOG launcher space, huzzah. To the detriment of One Launcher To Rule Them All.
To be clear: I'm for a first party solution. I support their efforts as much as I can. It will have considerable impact on the users. Both ways.
If you see it form the point of view of a Linux user it's more fragmentation, but if you look at it from the point of view of a gamer it's less fragmentation. Guess who their target audience is?
Everyone in the linux world insists on fragmentation, though? It's a part of what makes it great and a mess at the same time.
And what of it? Every time a for profit company uses open source they'll either create a closed fork, and if they can't they'll create closed source modules for it.
I'm not saying it's bad to wish for companies to support FOSS, I'm just saying it's an unrealistic expectation to have.
The impression I've had for a long while now is that just as the software side is fragmented so is the userbase in what they want, including a segment that want one true way and all that fragmentation to go away. The trouble I see with catering to all that variation is it's putting an onus for more work on the developer (which needs funding from somewhere, most likely the publisher) and while linux (and GOG) is a niche market in the present and near term it doesn't seem like a winning proposition.
There's definitely a desire for an appliance/console like experience where all the complexity is hidden behind install/play buttons, and steam has got most of the way there. As protondb shows that can't go all the way and tweaking is needed owing to the shifting PC compatibility in general and running software from one OS on a different one, it's the nature of the beast. Personally pushing towards monoculture on an open platform needs to be tempered, and there's a lot of debate previously for other places where that's relevant.
... and I'm concurring with the threadstarter. They could do nothing, donate to Heroic, or this. I'm not invested in this, just raised a keyword.
The arguments are tired, the word serves us well. They insist, yes, and forever remain hopeful that This Might Be the Year. Meanwhile, the reality exists for plenty already.
Not quite. You can use Galaxy to download the offline installers (or just do that through the website), but when you install a game through Galaxy, it downloads a special build which it just copies to the right location, without running a separate installer.
My website contains ~6000 unique data points in effectively infinite combinations on effectively infinite pages. Some of those combinations are useful for humans, but the AI-scrapers could gain a near-infinite efficiency improvement by just identifying as a bot and heeding my robots.txt and/or rel="nofollow" hints to access the ~500 top level pages which contain close to everything which is unique. They just don't care. All their efficiency attempts are directed solely toward bypassing blocks. (Today I saw them varying the numbers in their user agent strings: X15 rather than X11, Chrome/532 rather than Chrome/132, and so on...)
reply