gamesieve

The Bright Data mentioned in the article, as well as other similarly malicious but even harder to identify parties, most certainly do fire up residential proxies, no matter what the site, no matter how useless or duplicate the data which they're trying to get. Not at first - they start by trying to get your content from cheap data center connections - but as soon as some kind of bot-mitigation appears, they move to residential proxies to try and evade that, with a first tier coming from "global south" residential proxies, and then scaling up to (presumably more expensive / less widely available) proxies from the USA (I've seen some from Europe, but very few in relative terms). Each tier also appears to have the option to run JavaScript.

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...)

Don't know if it matches with the lawsuits, but could've been Third Voice (1999-2001).

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.

The Crime Cities installer does not appear to have ever been updated since it launched: https://www.gogdb.org/product/1485600994#changelog

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.)

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep... has a full list.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

https://gamesieve.com/

An alternative front-end / game discovery service / price tracker for GOG's catalog. Mostly manually enhancing the data from the API (90% heuristics, 10% human effort, as the total dataset isn't large enough for it to be worth doing otherwise), and offering a wider range of filters for it all.

I'm grouping all related products together for a more complete overview, and have recently added library import, where I mostly 'solved' the issue of GOG not recognizing that you own certain games if you got them as a freebie or as part of a since-delisted deluxe edition. Just now starting in on incomplete "series" listings, seeing what'd be involved with making them contain all relevant games, and then exposing that.

Online sentiment has drastically changed about how bad those broken promises were - a near-complete turnaround, similar to what happened with No Man's Sky. Basically from when the DLC was released, most people started feeling that they fulfilled the essence of everything that was promised.

I suspect this has been in a vague planning stage for the last few years, as various integrations between GOG and CD PROJEKT RED were slowly dismantled over that time (I particularly recall a GWENT account migration away from GOG).

Also, I guess this is as good a place as any to plug my GOG game discovery service and price tracker: https://gamesieve.com/ - basically a more full-featured way to explore GOG's catalog.