I sometimes have trouble understanding the need for achievements like that and trying to make a big deal out of it working or not. If its important, take a sheet of paper, write the achievements from steam on it and cross it from the paper once you are done. Doesnt matter if the machine lets it count, you know you did it and cross it off, right?
this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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I see achievements as a path made by the devs to guide you throught all the game features, I want an official way to know I did something. Kill X enemies with Y gun, ok, they probably want me to experience using some specific gun they worked on it but they don't want to make it mandatory use inside the game.
There's you explanation.
The people you're replying to clearly don't care about replayability; I'm guessing they want either a sandbox environment with no rules or to beat a game once and move on. Don't bother arguing back. It's a waste of time.
You're qualified to pidgeonhole everyone else's game preference based on whether they care about achievements, but I'm the arrogant, ignorant one?
Hey, fight fire with fire. I'm attempting to cancel out your unwanted noise.
OP's question was regarding GOG achievements, you have literally contributed nothing related to the discussion thus far and never will because you have nothing of value to add. Pack it up and go play your achievement-less games in peace.
By making an ass of yourself rather than contributing in any meaningful way to the discussion
What kind of games do you play? If the game you play has any complex mechanics, you may be thinking you're doing something right when you aren't. Achievements checks help with that.
Who cares about achievements? Play the game and have fun. To put it another way: if it's no fun without achievements, have you considered that could just be a bad game?
This. I strongly believe that achievements killed my passion for gaming and replaced it with a desire to complete, or 100%. Once I realised that I began to shun achievements (turned off notifications, switched to PC, started playing games with them nonexistent or disabled) I renewed my passion and rediscovered the joy of gaming.
Furthermore, the whole reason achievements were created was wholly twofold: a sense of pride and accomplishment for the gamer, which is real and cannot be discounted by the second, which is a metrics and tracking system Xbox offered to game publishers. Since all achievements are dated and timed, Xbox was able to offer valuable insights to publishers as to how their games were played. That’s why most games gave you one for completing the tutorial and/or starting the game. That was the reference point: from there, how long did it take you to do other things?
The best example of this and its effects was Fallout 3 to Fallout 4. In Fallout 4, some players were upset you could only be a good guy. But in Fallout 3, there were none karmic achievements, for having good, neutral, or evil karma at three levels (8, 16, 24?). Since a vast majority of players got those levels at Good karma, they had the receipts to prove players mostly played good. Without achievements, they would not have had those receipts.
The reason GOG isn’t tracking pirates isn’t to spite them, it’s because they don’t want the data from them and can’t or don’t care to separate the data.
When PlayStation and Steam added achievements, I am not sure if they included the metrics for publishers or if they only copied the gamer dopamine feature from Xbox. I did not know GOG had them. I don’t use their launcher; never have.
I like how Animal Crossing did achievements on Switch. Local only and you get tickets for a vending machine for them. Only now I have 189K I’ll never spend. Oh, you also get title keywords you can select from to make your profile title (you can’t just put whatever, e.g. on my old Enya themed island, my title was Wild Child, after the song, because I’d unlocked the title keywords Wild and Child). Silly pointless game. I’m now playing the 3DS version on my MacBook, and it’s way better. Also silly and pointless. Still love it.
I strongly believe that achievements killed my passion for gaming and replaced it with a desire to complete, or 100%.
What games did you 100%?
Pretty much everything I owned in 2000-2020:
- Left 4 Dead series
- Life is Strange series
- Rocket League
- Mirror's Edge
- Gears of War series
- Minecraft on X360, XOne, PE and Java (Windows and Bedrock are abominable)
- Saint's Row series
- Fable III
- Assassin's Creed series
- Portal series
- Trials HD, Evolution, Fusion
- Guitar Hero series
- Fallout 3
- Resident Evil 5
- BioShock series
- Geometry Wars
- Halo 3: ODST (completely failed Legendary)
- UNO and World Series of Poker on Xbox Live
- Slime Rancher
- Fall Guys
I deleted my first account while reducing my connection to corporations, but here's what I got on my secondary account:
-- And well, any popular game sold on Xbox 360. Call of Duty.. Got WaW and BO1 completed, and BO2 half the camos toward diamond.. What broke me was when I spent - no, worked - 9 hours a day, 6-7 days a week on the Modern Warfare reboot (2019), collecting as many calling cards as possible on my way to 10th Prestige L70(?) and unlocking every weapon and fancy badge.. After overworking full time, and completing the Season Pass, I had four days left until the next season started. Something like two months on for four days' break. It basically turned my passion into an addiction.
I still complete puzzle games on my mobile, but I almost exclusively play Zen or story-driven games on console and PC now
Yeah, that makes sense. Glad you moved on from that.
RPGs tend to have a lot of meaningless collectathons and I see why getting wrapped in that can lead to burn out. Games with FOMO cycles are a whole different breed, almost, or rather straight up, predatory.
I see achievements as a path made by the devs to guide you throught all the game features, I want an official way to know I did something. Kill X enemies with Y gun, ok, they probably want me to experience using some specific gun they worked on it but they don't want to make it mandatory use inside the game.
On the other hand, you could just play the game in whatever way you enjoy and not worry about developer intention. If you feel like exploring all of the possibilities, you can still do that. If you don't, you don't have to.
The game is an art to me, I want to fully experience it and understand every design decision behind it. It can be disappointing, boring, it doesn't matter, it's all part of the process. If I keep hopping between only games I find fun I'll never truly experience anything, I'll just spoil my brain with cheap and easy dopamine and move one to the next cheap and easy dopamine source.
The way I understand it, achievements are mostly a social thing, something you can just pop on to your gaming social profile that you've achieved. This is difficult/impossible to do without having the centralized profile in the first place, hence why it's tied to Galaxy in the first place.
The games that want to use achievements as challenges within the game usually have a separate achivement menu/system inside them for that purpose, so they are tied in the game properly.
Achivements are features of the launcher, and not the game. How would it work in case of GoG games without galaxy? Where would you look them up? They could in theory just ship the achivement unlocking api with the base game, but then you don't have a way how to view them.
Some games have them built in as "trophies" you can look at in the main menu
But in that case you don't need the adittional layer of your platform supporting it, no?
Correct. I think they are wanting this type of "local" achievements set up for games which would normally only have them through a social platform
The games that want to use achievements as challenges within the game usually have a separate achivement menu/system inside them for that purpose, so they are tied in the game properly.
Not always. It's easier to delegate it to the platform than bake it inside the game. This has been the norm for many niche genres for a long time.
As a game developer, I kind of understand it. But, from desogn standpoint and if you're releasing on GoG, you should keep people who play without galaxy in mind.
I see achievements as a path made by the devs to guide you throught all the game features, I want an official way to know I did something. Kill X enemies with Y gun, ok, they probably want me to experience using some specific gun they worked on it but they don't want to make it mandatory use inside the game.
The comment you replied to here actually has your answer, but you gave it your copy-pasted comment you've been giving to everyone asking "Why do you want achievements".
Give this comment here a read
I don't agree, modern games have telemetry, achievements can be manipulated on Steam using Steam Achievement Manager, developers can't rely on it as a way of tracking or feedback. Modern games have telemetry embedded on it for this purpose. Gathering feedback via achievements completion is unreliable.
Your question was about whether you can get GOG achievements in pirated games.
The comment answered your question and explained why achievements are the way they are...that is, separate from the games themselves.
You're disagreeing with a tangential point, to someone who didn't make the point, while seemingly ignoring the fact that your question was answered.
Regardless of why achievements exist, what they're used for, whether there are better alternatives, etc...GOG's achievements are hosted on their servers, attached to accounts on their servers.
GOG achievements are one incentive that they use to attempt to persuade people to buy their DRM-Free games rather than copy them. If you want to earn achievements on a GOG account, you'd have to trick GOG into thinking you own the game, which is hard and risky.
Alternatively, you'd have to find some other service that you can use to earn achievements. And that is a service that costs money to run, so it's not all that likely that it'd exist.
You can check out RetroAchievements, but they don't have (modern) PC games on there. It's free, powered by donations and likely self-funding from its core team.
You're wrong, I just don't care anymore to argue about it. Just downvote me and call it a day.
I'm not even sure what you're saying I'm wrong about, lol
This is a valid point. If devs are releasing the game on GoG, they should keep people who don't play with achivements in mind. That's a game design failure I understand.
Achivements should be just a social layer, something you share about your progress, that was the point. If they are important for progression/gameplay, and you're releasing on GoG, you should include it in game.
This might be it achievement watchdog
Currently, it only supports Goldberg Steam Emulator, as other emulators may use different achievement formats.
Very nice option, thx for sharing, but isn't it limited to Steam games?
I think the overlap of steam games and GoG games is pretty large. Many games on GoG seem to be repackaged Steam games. Just give it a shot to see if it works with the games you got.
So if you want an actual technical explanation...
Games on Steam have Steam Achievements because they are coded in such a way that certain game events/conditions hook into the Steam API and then award you the achievement on Steam.
To take a game that has achievements that work with Steam, or ... whatever Xbox Live is called now, or PSN... and make them work on GOG... you have to recode the parts of the game that trigger achievements, you have to add in the API that links to your GOG account and triggers the achievement to flag.
That takes work. Its arguably, technically, a kind of porting.
So either GOG or the game's devs would have to do that work.
If nobody does, no cheevos.
Or, sometimes, a game will have its own totally internal achievement system that is local to it, basically like a sort of save file, kind of... but then you'd still have to hook that up to whatever platform's achievement system/API.
Or or, I guess, it might be possible to make some kind of... basically shim, like a crack, or sort of emulator kind of thing, that 'hijacks' the game exe and runs it inside of itself, monitors for the achievement triggers for whatever system the exe you have calls out, and then basically translates that into a trigger for the... GOG or whatever else achievement system.
Basically Goldberg but for GOG.
But that would either require GOG's achievement API being open source, or someone reverse engineering it, or basically 'acquiring' the source code through probably not strictly legal means.
And then if you use this, using it could/would count as hacking PSN or Xbox Live or GOG Cheevos or whatever.
tl:dr; Many GOG games don't have cheevos because somebody would have to actually do a significant amount of coding to make that work, and that doesn't always happen.
Like, for Godot, the game engine, there is an addon that adds support for hooking into the Steam API to make achievements work on Steam, if you release the game on Steam, and also of course coordinate with Valve and do all the stuff they need from you so that your game and its cheevos are accepted as part of your game and Steam's support for it.
But you can also just not do that.
And save a lot of time.
Maybe add in cheevo supoort later in an update, or maybe never.
I really hate achievements. I spent so long grinding 360 and PS4 games for the sake of completion. PC gaming is so much more relaxing. Steam doesn't display any achievements totals on my profile so I don't feel inclined to get them and just play a game through to the end and move on.
Toby Fox was a wise man for getting rid of that shit, and OMORI taught me that they can hamper the experience, because now I know I missed out on feeding a cat fish on day 1. Even on Steam, I don't like the game's profile taunting me every time I look at it - can you turn that off?
Never had that problem playing Nintendo games besides the occassional in-game achievement lists, which are easier to ignore. Just give me a piss-colored title screen as a completion reward. Wouldn't even know about it without the Internet.
Tbf, my experience with Gog achievements has been quite bad even with paid games played via Galaxy. While most worked, some achievements triggered silently, some on the following game start, and some straight up didn't work. Maybe it was a problem on the game side, but anyway if some games have bad Gog achievements, maybe it's less worth it to get those working.