Hi samuraigaiden.

Games installed through or imported in GOG Galaxy, have their "Launch" shortcut redirecting to the GOG Galaxy application.
GOG Galaxy is an optional application for the single player portion of every game bough on GOG.com, except for specific ones, which require it for providing multiplayer services. If you want to launch your installed games without GOG Galaxy launching along them, then you have to create a shortcut of their .exe directly.
Even when the GOG Galaxy application launches along your game, it can be exited at any time without the game shutting down and it's not required to launch the application in order to be able to launch the game. Except for the multiplayer portion of some games, that require GOG Galaxy, in which case you will be disconnected from your online session, but without the game shutting down.
Bottom line, GOG Galaxy does not operate even close, on the D.R.M. level of Valve's rental ware.
Downloads can bug out in certain cases, which in part has to do with that the GOG Galaxy application is not as invasive as Steam, on modifying network settings and creating ports through the firewall, while when updating, it seems it does mess up the functionality of the initial installation and needs a fresh install.

Cheers.

I know it's not DRM, but it sure feels like it when it boots up along with the game. I in fact had not checked the shortcut path, so thanks for the info.

What? Seriously? With at least a third of PCs still on 7, that'd be an awfully bad move on their part. And even after more than 6 months, heck, some 2% are still on XP, over 5 years after EoL, and in case of 7 I'm thinking that number will be quite a few times higher at the same moment, wouldn't be at all surprised with some 10% in 2025.

I don't use Galaxy, I don't need it. I keep all my GOG installers in a folder called GOG games.
I keep all games' shortcuts on Desktop, on a folder called Games.
That's it!

Hi again samuraigaiden.

When you have the GOG Galaxy application installed (if you don't the game will launch directly from its .exe), and using the "Start Menu" shortcut of the game to launch it, the command goes through the GOG Galaxy application, which recognizes your installed game, even if you haven't imported it yet or installed it through GOG Galaxy and launches it, possibly after it verifies/updates its files.
If you wish for the "Start Menu" shortcut to not go through GOG Galaxy, you have to change its "Target" and "Start in" paths, to the ones the shortcut located in the game's folder has. Otherwise you can "Pin to the Start" the shortcut found in the game folder.

Cheers.

Me me me!

...or use this shortcut manager:
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shman.html

The principle of changing the appropriate file paths would remain the same, no matter how someone would choose to carry this out.
I don't see how this program automates the procedure for me. Am I missing something?
...
:)

I don't use the Galaxy client because the mechanism I use to access the internet is not the one on which I play games, hence I must transfer the executables across an air gap to install them before playing. Galaxy requires a connection.

I have dozens of games installed. I scratch whichever itches.

Alphabetically. (We had to decide, many years ago, how to organize our cinematographica. In the end it seemed simpler to just store them all by name, since movies can be categorized in several different genres, typically, and directors produces and actors appear in many different works. The basic rule is —— ignoring articles indefinite (a/n) and definite (the) —— sort by film title and then year (ascending order), because titles tend to be re-used over time.)

There will be no pictures.

I don't see how it can ever be automated since no program can know what you want to change the target into. (maybe if it contained a database of original game executable names)

That shortcut manager could however provide a better overview, for people that have A LOT of games installed simultaneously. ;-)

Does anyone remember the old Norton Commander for DOS? In essence it didn't do much more than could be done via the command prompt.... I was still glad I had that tool!

I have it, but honestly I never think about it much.

On my system, the two methods I have for displaying menus both recognize Game; as the correct category for games. It sounds like your system is misconfigured. What I mean is that I extend the categories. For example, from 7 Billion Humans:

Categories=Game;LogicGame;X-Programming;

On my FVWM menu generator, this places it in Games/Logic Games/Programming. Making the subcategories work in other app menus requires more work than I'm willing to put in, although it's not hard. I'll probably eventually make a script to automate the menu file generation for this.

Most of mine are ran through Galaxy. Never had an issue with it. The only ones that aren't are a few games that I have multiple installations of, a game that I run some sort of mod organizer with, and a few specific DOS games. The DOS games are like that because I keep all the Gold Box games and some Sierra games all under the same DOSBox configuration.

As far as organizing it's separate folders for GOG, Steam, Blizzard, Origin, and ones I have physical copies of.

my system configured as it should, i specifically installed everything to support gnome.org menus and usually it works for games from repos or Linux game installers. maybe it's wine issue rather than gog's (because this issue appears with windows game installers launched from wine), could be wine fails to create proper categories as well. just tried couple of small offline installers for Linux games and indeed it works. will dig into wine then. thanks for head ups! :)

*nods* Actually kept it around till I think at least 2008. One interesting thing about it was that it overrode "access denied" situations (mainly caused by my antivirus, but possibly not just that, not sure anymore) and I could work with (usually delete) files I couldn't normally under Windows. That was only necessary a few times, but sure came in handy then.