The Hitchhiker's Guide To GOG Galaxy

[Krud]

GOG Galaxy needs a disclaimer saying "DON'T PANIC" when you open it, and that's the last Douglas Adams reference I'll be making in this post.

I love GOG.com and everything it represents, and want nothing more than for it to flourish and catch on with more and more game publishers/companies. And I've tentatively embraced GOG Galaxy 2.0, because even though its necessarily online nature is potentially at odds with some of GOG's mindset, the fact that it is optional (for singleplayer gaming) makes up for it.

My only regret, if you can call it that, is connecting all of my accounts from various other storefronts to it, including Steam, UPlay, Origin and even EGS. It turns my relatively modest GOG library into a massive, seemingly endless backlog full not only games I've never even so much as installed, but a lot of redundancies as well, thanks mostly to giveaways and deals. According to Galaxy, in fact, I apparently have Dragon Age Origins on THREE different platforms, and actively installed via two at the moment.

This last detail is what I mainly wanted to talk about. Without Galaxy, I lose track of what games I have where. As a result, at some point I wanted to continue my latest Dragon Age playthrough, and whatever front-end I had open reinstalled it. And it seems the saved games were fine with it. Meanwhile, my original install from another front-end was still sitting on m hard drive taking up space. And unlike the new install, it was modded. As of this typing I don't remember which was which. Was it the Steam version? Or my newer, DRM-free GOG version? ::looks at Galaxy listing again:: Oh, and it looks like I somehow have a lesser, non-Ultimate version of the game installed on Origin.

Right now my favorite aspect of Galaxy is I can scroll through my entire collection and occasionally stop and think "Oh, hey! I forgot all about that game, I should try it." Or even "Wait, when did I get that game? Must have been in a bundle." Though my prevailing thought still tends to be some variationon, "Wow... unless science makes some major longevity advances in the next fifty years, I do not have time for all these games." But despite that, I still regard Galaxy 2.0 as "Mostly Harmless." (Yep, I lied about no more Douglas Adams references.)

Anyway, I share these embarrassing bits of forgetful excess to ask you, have you made any discoveries about your game collection thanks to Galaxy? Has it caused you to feel better or worse about your backlog? Did your collection turn out to be not as overwhelming as you thought, or its it in fact massively sprawling beyond your original estimates? Have you in fact even bothered importing all of your other libraries to Galaxy 2.0, if you even use Galaxy, for that matter?

 

[Zloth]

Haven't done it yet, but I do plan to once that ugly "beta" gets off the front. By the sound of it, that won't be too long from now. As long as GOG isn't willing to pull that designation off the application, though, I'm not willing to do anything with it.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I've been using it for a few months, its exactly what I wanted. I don't mean to say its flawless, but I used to avoid buying anything anywhere other than Steam, only because I like to have all my games in one list.

In my case its caused me to start buying a few more games, because I'm now actually aware when other platforms than Steam have sales on, I still only have around 200 though. I'd probably have a lot more if I'd actively used my Steam account before 2012. I clung onto physical media a fair amount longer than most, and I didn't have a gaming PC from around 2009 until then.

Funny how 'only' having 200 games seems reasonable these days.

 

[I Will Haunt You]

I like Galaxy well enough and I'm trying to to get myself to open it first to launch my games just for the sake of testing its overall usefulness. While it has a vast amount of info for my games most of it I just don't really care about.

My biggest complaint so far is that it can be very slow sometimes when building its library from linked accounts and that sometimes it will oddly disconnect connected accounts requiring me to manually reconnect them.

 

[jpishgar]

I've somewhat held off on installing Galaxy due to what I expect may be full-on opportunity paralysis when presented with the number of games acquired across a multitude of platforms - and the accompanying panic from not having played some of them.

Though I definitely get the value in pooling them all together in one spot to give a look-see as to what might tickle the fancy to play at any given point in time.

 

[McStabStab]

I know for a fact I have duplicates of games due to giveaways and bundles on different services. How does GOG Galaxy handle this?

 

[Krud]

I know for a fact I have duplicates of games due to giveaways and bundles on different services. How does GOG Galaxy handle this?

As of 2.0.13 (not the latest version), it shows the cover art of the game (if available), and when you hover over it with your mouse, shows you the icons of which storefronts you have it on.

So if you have Mirror's Edge on Origin, Steam, and GOG, it will show you the icons for all three, but only show up once in your library*. The only exception is if you have a different version of a game, that is tracked separately.

(Note: YMMV, depending on whether you use grid or list view, whether you sort by title or platform, etc.)

 

[Grug]

It's a pretty decent tool. It's growing on me. I installed on my new pc to get ready for cyberpunk. (The first game I've preordered in years.)

Though has anyone else had trouble connecting to PSN? I keep getting an "unable to establish connection with the server" error when I try and sign in. I can't even sign into the PlayStation website either and I don't see any help when I go looking. Was going to try and call Sony support today.

 

[Frindis]

I still need to import my Steam library with a sareptas jar of games. Hopefully, the application does not explode.

Update: Finished syncing most of my gaming libraries with GOG 2.0 and it did it extremely fast. So far everything looks pretty ok and I like that you can get nice cover art from the games. What is still a big hit and miss (same with Steam) is the different game categories, like shooters, racing, etc. Some games are places in the wrong category and it is kind of annoying. Thankfully I have noticed that they are implementing a way for you to manually type in the right genre for the game in the future.

 

[Pifanjr]

I apologize for necroing, but I just installed GOG Galaxy and tagged all 300+ games I own and I wanted to share. It would've been nice to be able to select multiple games at once to tag them, but it still went faster than I expected.

I now have 45 games in my backlog, 61 I don't really care for and 103 I'm undecided on because I don't know what kind of game it is (mostly indie games I got for free somehow). I also have 15 games I wouldn't mind replaying and several dozen games to play with friends. The rest are hidden because I'm not planning on ever playing them (either because of lack of interest, or because I have a remastered edition as well).

So far I'm pretty happy with the Galaxy launcher. The only flaw I spotted is when it used the cover art for a Ben 10 game for RIP 2.

EDIT: I almost forgot, but one other flaw was that the download at https://www.gog.com/galaxy wouldn't work. I had to get the installer by opening my library, selecting a game and choosing the option to install it using Galaxy.

 

[Brian Boru]

I've used Galaxy for over a year, and am pretty happy with it. There's another which is also worth a look—HtG review and link:

Playnite

I don't think either gets the full library, there was a difference between what both launchers found, and a few games missing on each. I'd say they were ~98% accurate when I did that check ~a year ago.

Others I haven't used or tested:


Photon


LaunchBox