Hello, figured I'd point out a big flaw in GOG when it comes to simply installing a game from the platform compared to its main competitor Steam. I can't use GOG Galaxy on my system (Linux) but even then I don't really want to install more game launcher clients than I absolutely have to. In fact requirement to install an additional client is often enough for me to disregard a game entirely.

Few months ago I decided to finally play Baldurs Gate 3. I decided to buy it from GOG.

Download took slightly longer than 1 hour. I have a average 470 mbit/s download speed which should be able to download the installer way faster than that. The downloaded installer takes roughly 100gb from the hard drive. To install the game I needed to clear out some space in my drive since the game requires about 140gb after installation. So from my old 450gb SSD I needed to have almost half of it empty just to install the game.

Then came the time to actually install the game. The installer is slow. Very slow. After 45 minutes of waiting for the installer to finish it was at about 45-50% done, so I expected it to take another 45-50 minutes.

At this point, I looked up how to refund the game on GOG, then I stopped the installer, deleted it and refunded the game on GOG. This took me about 10 minutes. I went to Steam and bought the game there. Downloading and installing the game from steam took 30 minutes and it was ready to play.

Even after downloading the installer from GOG and already being 50% done with installing the game, it was still faster to quit there and get the game from Steam instead. This is just ridiculous.

Suggestions:

1. Improve the download speed. I see so many other threads about slow download speeds here.

2. Alternative installer. The current installer works perfectly for smaller games. But maybe for these massive 100gb games there should be an alternative downloader installer. An installer that doesn't contain the game files in it, but a client that downloads the files as part of the installation process. I imagine you'd need to make it ask the user for their GOG account username and password for security. This way users don't need to separately download a large file over an hour and spend 50 minutes decompressing them from a slow installer. Would also save a lot of file storage space.

The idea behind the alternative installer is not to replace the current offline installer, because I bet there are users who want to keep the offline installers for game preservation purposes, but instead to offer a more user friendly alternative.

Well, instead of literally going "this is going too slow, I'm fine NOT OWNING MY GAME kthx bye gog", you could've used Galaxy and done the same thing as you did with Steam.

"But Galaxy is not available on Linux"
You can use Heroic Games Launcher instead, which is a third party launcher endorsed by GOG. And yes, it lets you download a game's files straight to your computer.

I get that GOG installers are slow for big games. Still, the path of least resistance would be to just wait and you'd get the game ready, always DRM-free even if the developer changes their mind (unlikely for Larian, but still), and an offline installer that you can tuck safely somewhere else. Yet you took the effort of refunding the game just to buy it again from valve's "you'll own nothing and be happy" steam and download it there.

Patience is a virtue.

So the solution is for GOG to advertise a 3rd party launcher instead of fixing their slow download speeds and slow offline installer?

Just tested this launcher by installing Witcher 3. Sure would have been handy to know about it back then.

I can't say I like Steam much but as with the Divinity Original Sin games, Larian doesn't actually use DRM on Steam on BG3. At the end of the day, if you "have" to use a client to install your game each time, what's the Galaxy vs Steam difference in actual practise for large games lacking DRM? You only truly "own" things on GOG after you've downloaded and backed up the installer. Downloading the "cloud version" each time you want to play whilst DRM-Free ends up "I'll think about backing up my games someday, but not today or tomorrow or..." isn't really 'owning' them here any more than elsewhere.

The guy didn't gain anything getting the Steam version over the Galaxy version, but if you only ever play GOG games by re-downloading from the cloud via Galaxy each time, then he also didn't really lose anything either (something GOG might want to think harder about in the long run...)

The example could've been a game by people other than Larian, you wouldn't be able to trust them as much. True. But even then, a game you downloaded through Galaxy will still not require Galaxy in the same sense Larian games don't use steam but you can guarantee it for all games and not just a fraction of what the store offers, so if you're of that mindset Galaxy is still a viable stopgap option. it's not the ideal way of going about the ownership thing, true, but small steps are better than nothing, right?

The guy grabbed the installer, and after it took too long for him, just reverted to the ways of Steam. You could say they were almost on track right there. The installer is slow for sure, but it requiring 140GBs of free space on top of itself is just how this thing works unless you move the installer to another connected storage medium.

I was not "almost" on right track. I was on right track the moment I refunded the game. Trying to install the game through GOG offline installer was an ass customer experience. But it doesn't have to be like that. To you it may be more important than anything to have a DRM free copy of a game but not for everyone. For me it would be a nice bonus, but that bonus did not out weight the negatives.

Buying means owning whatever it is you bought after the fact. "I own my game" or "I own my book" or "I own my movie" are NOT a """nice bonus""", it is supposed to be the end result of a basic, economic transaction. Valve, Amazon (books) and what have you have fucked over the entire concept to the point where you now consider it as a """bonus""" that does "not out weight the negatives."

So, why not go ahead and be happy with your choice of not owning anything because you're too impatient to wait? It's clearly a you problem more than it is GOG's (admittedly valid) problem by now.

How does this make the offline installer better exactly? That is the main topic of this thread, not whether you prefer DRM free product or not. Is GOG supposed to remain a worse service or should it try to improve? Some customers are ok with just renting a product if they get a better service as they do so. You can call them stupid if you want but that is not going to change their minds.

So back to the topic. How to improve the service of providing the game? The large and slow installer is not ideal when it comes to large games.
The Heroic Launcher you suggested works perfectly, how about bringing this to the customers attention somehow?
How does the downloader client I suggested sound? The installed game would still be DRM free and user is free to put their game files into a ZIP file if they want to preserve it, but the method of delivering the game would be better than the offline installer is now.

Improving the installer is something GOG should be constantly working on. Better, faster, easier - accessibility attracts customers. Probably.

That would be a double edged sword as many in the community see the launcher as a form of DRM and complain whenever focus is put on that rather than improving other features.

I think we're well past the stage at which GOG can keep on coasting along ignoring all the plentiful feedback they've had on the subject:-

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/i_dont_remember_offline_installers_sucking_this_hard/page1
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_standalone_installer_is_single_threaded_and_so_slow/page1
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/offline_game_installers_why_use_ctemp/post17
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/dosbox_linux_support_dropped/post27

The reasons offline installers take ages here / need to "double unpack" is partly due to poor default compression settings and partly because they started "Galaxifying" offline installers in the most over-convoluted manner possible that store files as Galaxy streams that need reconstructing from a manifest. Several of us tested this in the past (time how long it takes to install a game from an offline installer, then zip up the game folder / create your own InnoSetup based installer / Self extracting RAR, reboot (to clear Windows file cache), then time how long it takes to unzip that zip file, and both .7z and .rar formats are regularly up to 3-8x faster even using the slowest Maximum + Solid compression settings). All the "other stuff" doesn't justify it, ie, importing registry setting only takes <0.1s, creating a Start Menu shortcut link takes 0.1s, installing the usual VCRedist Dependencies barely 5-10s per dependency (usually no more than 2-3x per game).

GOG could certainly make them a lot faster if they truly wanted (simply based on the observation that several of us have done exactly that and benchmarked them here in the past). Even testing smallish 1-5GB sized games have shown differences like 9s (extracting a zip file of the game folder) vs 57s (GOG installer) with no real justifiable reason for the disparity beyond being unnecessarily single-threaded / unwanted Galaxy packaging that needs to unzip everything to an intermediate temp folder (ie, write everything twice over).

That I'm not disputing. The way these installers are structured could be improved for certain into something that's more efficient, and unpack faster. But what you see here is a problem that's roughly 66% the OP's mindset and 33% GOG's installer inefficiencies.

Say by building your own installer, Baldur's Gate 3 installs in 1 hour instead of 2, or even 45 minutes. Would OP have continued with GOG? For all you know, if the installer had 5 minutes left they'd have still done the song and dance of refunding and buying the game elsewhere. OP even pointed how long they'd spent waiting for the download and obtaining free space. If you solve the installer slowness, that'd be welcome for all of us, but I fear that OP would not see it.

The problem is 100% with how GOG delivers the product.

Going by what GOG offers when buying the game in question:
240gb required to install the game rather than just 140gb that the game needs.
2 hours to download and install the game rather than 30 minutes from a competitor and this cannot be fixed by simply having a faster internet, I already have an average 470 mbit/s download rate.

Call me impatient if you want but it is my time and my hard drive space being wasted after I paid money for the game.

It is insane to treat someone not wanting to deal with this insanity as "the problem" while claiming that sticking to your favorite online store is "the right track".

As pointed by AB2012. There is a lot of stupidity involved with the offline installers from GOG.

I can't answer for him, but it still shouldn't be anywhere near 45-60mins installing a game locally. Eg, I can unzip an 18GB sized .7z file containing the game folder for Prey (2017) reading and writing from the same old slow 5 year old SATA SSD (MX500) in under 2 mins. Extrapolate that to 100GB games, and reading an offline installer from an SSD and writing to same SSD shouldn't be any more than 5-10mins (NVMe) / 12-20mins (SATA) worst case. If GOG is taking even 1 hour to install a 100GB game to modern SSD's with +4GB per second read / write speeds, they're doing something seriously wrong.

At the end of the day, regardless of how the OP behaves as an individual, GOG has a "First Impression Problem" in general, ie, they seem to almost deliberately not want to fix website / offline installer problems to 'accidentally on purpose' drive people to "Just Use Galaxy", whilst remaining oblivious to the fact people's first point of contact with GOG is the website / offline installers, they try GOG for the first time, see how clunky it is, and instead of "Just Using Galaxy" what happens is their tolerance level for the store as a whole drops, and they then just head back to Steam. It's definitely in GOG's interest to start improving the non-Galaxy experience here regardless of what the OP does personally.

The offline installers are actually named
Offline Backup Game Installers.

That name does tell as what they are seen by GoG.
They are not seen as the regular way, but they are Backups. And if you would try to backup your Steam BG3, you would need that at last 100GB too.

As you don't seem to be interested in the backup part of the backup installer, there are other ways (underexplained for Linux, yes) to get the steam experience for installing the game.

Could they be faster, yes.
Could there be Galaxy for Linux, yes.
Could GoG tell you more about the alternative installer/launcher for Linux, yes.

Are you expecting stuff from the offline backup installers they are not build, nor intended for in the first place - yes.