I think too it can be misleading since on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE (which works entirely without Galaxy and how I run games).

They do this to push Galaxy for convenience I suppose as most are used to clients that handle updates but it can be confusing if some wonder why for instance their offline installer shortcut opened Galaxy instead.

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.

> on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE

I think they've recently changed this.