No discussion just a final word. Please differentiate your own opinion and actual facts. Thank you.

Catventurer spoke the facts though as achievements are consistently the only reason the buggy Galaxy stub was invented for offline installers in the first place (to stop games from crashing when a game makes an "achievement unlocked" API call and expects a response back from a client that isn't running...) Cloud saves can be handled by the client 'externally' without the game even knowing the Internet exists (see how DOSBox / ScummVM do it even for 1970/80's games), so it clearly isn't that. You'd probably see far less hostility to achievements here if they weren't directly responsible for the constant enshitification downslide in quality of offline installers like the new trend of repackaging the Steam version of games with Steamworks Achievements and Steamworks API intact inside a Galaxy "ghost wrapper" (ie, glorified Steam emulator crack) which in turn is packaged inside a Galaxy emulator stub inside the offline installers then slapping a GOG logo over the top and wondering why more and more issues arise on the back of such a ludicrously over-engineered "Steam emulator cracks wrapped around Galaxy stubs are the new half-baked DRM-Free" design philosophy vs just packaging a clean DRM-Free version into the installers (as GOG used to) and leaving the Galaxy features in for just the Galaxy version.

When GOG's modern 'emulated Steam version' builds are literally no different internally to pirated Steam repacks bundled with the GoldBerg Steam emulator but less reliable, then there's a real problem that needs addressing beyond "I like cheevos, everyone else's degraded experience doesn't matter" and there's a limit as how often you can blame a string of confused builders all making the same "mistake" as somehow being "isolated QA incidents" when the architectural plans they have to follow are themselves faulty...

Agreed. That is why I have favorited a certain thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_with_gog_games_that_have_ingame_achievements_v2/page1

Too few games on that list. ;(
Issue closed? Yeey!

I assume that "the new trend of repackaging the Steam version of games with Steamworks Achievements and Steamworks API intact inside a Galaxy "ghost wrapper" is exactly why far fewer games that are newly-released on GOG are missing Achievements than used to be so in recent years, from before the time when that "ghost wrapper" was a thing; the years before seem to have had much higher numbers of games with missing Achievements.

There is a great alternative which GOG could implement so that devs would not have to use the "ghost wrapper," but also, GOG games would not usually be missing Achievements either.

That would be for GOG to remove the "ghost wrapper" option for devs, and also at the same time, to implement a new, strict policy whereby no game is allowed to be released on GOG if the same title has Achievements on any other platform, but will not have equivalent Galaxy Achievements as well.

That solution would make everyone happy, other than lazy & unethical devs who can't be bothered to do a small amount of work to implement Galaxy Achievements manually, in order to give GOG customers feature parity with & equal treatment to their customers on other stores, in exchange for the hard-earned money that GOG customers are giving them (which is same exact value of money that their customers on Steam give them for a fully-featured game version...so why should GOG users get a gimped, feature-removed version for the same money?!).

But people in the anti-Achievement camp would never co-sign with that solution, would they?

Given the fact that they certainly would not, then it become understandable as to why the "ghost wrapper" is a necessary solution, at a bare minimum, so as most GOG games stop having missing Achievements, like they used to do in the times from before when this new "ghost wrapper" trend took effect.

What wouldn't be fair, though, is for the anti-Achievement camp to insist on having their cake, and also eating it too, via being against both the most effective solution to solving the problem of missing Achievements on GOG (that being a new, strict policy, always enforced by GOG, by which GOG would not allow missing Achievements ever to occur on GOG for any newly-released game), and also being against the much less strict, compromise "ghost wrapper" solution that is currently in place, which is a solution that meets both camps (anti-Achievement, and pro-Achievement) in the middle of the road.

As for the quoted statement, ""I like cheevos, everyone else's degraded experience doesn't matter""...

...by the exact same equal token, pro-Achievement advocates could fairly & reasonably offer rebuttal to that point by saying:

...the anti-Achievement camp are facilitating the degradation of experiences of pro-Achievement customers who enjoy that feature, via how anti-Achievement customers want the "ghost wrapper" to be removed, but at the time, they do not want any alternative solution to be implemented to replace the "ghost wrapper."

And thereby, they are, in essence, advocating that most games that become newly-released on GOG going forward are going to be missing Achievements again.

But that's a big problem.

And that would not be equitable.

Because for GOG customers who do enjoy using the Achievements feature, then missing Achievements on GOG results in those customers having a degraded experience.

Why should pro-Achievement customers' degraded experiences be of less worth than anti-Achievement customers' degraded experiences?

Unless a rational & irrefutable justification for that exists (I don't think it does), then GOG removing the "ghost wrapper" option would not be a fair or just action, until if & when such time as first a new solution is implemented, which will guarantee that newly-released games on GOG will not be missing Achievements more often than they did during the time period while the "ghost wrapper" option was active.

when cheevos get booted out of games
cheevo lovers be like

*slow clap*

Of course they wouldn't considering the size of this list, all your "vision" would mean is mass deleting +1,600 games here including titles like Baldur's Gate 1-2 which weren't even designed to have achievements in the first place.

Most of the so-called "anti-achievement" crowd only started disliking them after they started degrading installers. There is no "equal reverse" of that. Fix that degradation and few such people are actually calling for achievements to be force removed from Galaxy versions in anything remotely approaching your extremist "I want GOG to be Steam in every way and if I don't get what I want then I demand half the games be force deleted from the store out of petty spite" nonsense. All we want is better quality offline installers. All you demand is some weird authoritarian collective punishment that halves the size of the store by openly threatening all of GOG's publishing partners... There is no sane "they have equal merit" thing there at all and at the end of the day the choice of a DRM-Free game from GOG in 2024 shouldn't be some bizarre manufactured false equivalence between offline installers now being nothing but pre-cracked Steam games in a Goldberg-style wrapper (this is what's in the offline installer Galaxy stub, ie, they are provably Steamworks versions with a GOG logo painted on top) vs your constant calls for GOG to literally delete itself out of business for everyone...

Because you're the one demanding a second choice of being able to buy Steam versions with Steamworks achievements on GOG in addition to already being able to buy the same Steam version with Steamworks achievements on Steam (two separate ways you can enjoy your precious Steam achievements still isn't enough), whilst the GOG offline installer pretty much is the only DRM-Free version for many games. The only real equivalence to your crazed rants there is if offline installer users started demanding any game with achievements be deleted not just from GOG but also from Steam, Epic, etc, which is the real equivalent of what you're shovelling every time you demand the only DRM-Free version in existence of a game be deleted "because GOG offline installers need more Steamworks, f**k everyone else"...

This is starting to feel like a broken record at this point but here we go again...

I understand your point but it's not a trivial "small amount of work", specially for games that are updated frequently and/or small teams.

I would rather have a game available on GOG without feature parity, e.g. achievements, than not have a drm-free version of the game available at all. We are getting plenty of gimped versions anyway to be able to get DRM-free versions, like multiplayer disabled etc.
It's already hard enough for GOG to get many of the high profile games at all, many not even day one.
shame I can only give +1...

You know gamers and all, myself included, but you can have achievements in real life too? Aren't they more important than in games? Half of the achievements in video games are in my opinion boring. Do this and that, get X amount of currency/influence/quests. A good example for well written achievements are built in-game anyways like Fallout New Vegas. (If anyone managed the failed speech check trophy knows what I mean)

I think sacrificing DRM-freeness for some fanciness is kinda dumb.
And to be clear I am not against achievements but they aren't a descriptive criteria for a good game.

fyi: https://www.gog.com/forum/exophobia/game_crash

For Exophobia, the offline version crashes whenever you save your game (really annoying, you need to boot the task manager and kill the process). This has been fixed in the Galaxy version, but still waiting for the fix to make its way to the offline version.

You can boot the game again and resume, but it is annoying as hell.

I don't know if you'd qualify this as a drm issue or not, but it is essentially a significant stability issue impacting only the offline installer. The dev indicated that he'd fix it as soon as he could, so this will likely go away.

Unless it gets to the point where people are really into it and they are paying you to play, I can't say I understand it and like a previous poster mentioned, I don't really care until that shite starts leaking into the offline installers.

You're introducing drm requirements into our games to enforce security on achievements that nobody else cares enough about to pay you to get them. To me, that's pure absurdity. Let's stop that. Just put that cr*p offline where it belongs for people who wants the quiet satisfaction of reaching a difficult threshold in their games. No need to shout it online. Nobody cares. Really.

Interesting! Will stay away from FEAR until this is resolved then, if it ever will be resolved.

This SecuROM discussion got me thinking, are we sure that FEAR is the only game that still have some parts of SecuROM still active?

I'm quoting a previous post from you "For those unaware, unlike every other former SecuROM game on GOG that had it removed, the SecuROM in FEAR was only partially removed".

Got a bit worried since I have some of the Tomb Raider games installed, and I know that these games used to have SecuROM. I can't find any REGEDIT entries and/or AppData folders that contain anything about SecuROM, but still.

There is nothing to fear but F.E.A.R. itself.

I don't think it affected anything else. FEAR2 seems clean. I think it's specific to whatever half-working crack GOG used to (half) remove the DRM than SecuROM in general. Someone else tested the GOG versions of Crysis, Mirrors Edge, etc, in the other thread and they had no problems. I have a ton of CD-ROM games (Cryostasis, Outrun 2006, etc) where NoCD's removed the SecuROM 'cleanly' including NOLF2 by the same developer using the same Lithtech Jupiter engine and they're fine. Games that had SecuROM removed in an official patch (Diablo 2, Neverwinter Nights 1-2, Prey (2006), STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl, Thief Deadly Shadows, etc) are all fine, both disc and GOG versions. It seems isolated to just FEAR1 (more specifically just the FEAR1 expansions - Perseus Mandate and Extraction Point) rather than being a generic former SecuROM problem.

Already informed GOG about this, the offline installer for the latest version should be available in the next few days!