Can see quite a number of people who'd be very unpleasantly surprised by that, all those complaining of slow download speeds, plus those who have relatively slow internet access of their own, who'll have to hope nothing will go wrong for the span of several hours, if not more, and at least a few who may be unable to get the game at all due to monthly download caps.

Right.

My monthly download cap is 50GB. So I would have to get a refund, if I bought that game.

Ideally they'd offer both: a single file setup and a split setup.
But if we can have only one I would rather not be stuck in 2010 until the whole world caught up technologically, sorry.

Would you rather download 30 4GB files successfully and have the 31st fail and get corrupted? Or would you rather download 90% of one 128GB file and have it fail, and get corrupted, so you would have to start over from scratch?
THAT IS THE POINT. Compatibility with FAT32 is also a bonus. I use GOGREPOC, but to be fair to GOG, Galaxy lets you download offline installers in one go too. People sometimes seem to forget that you can download offline installers via Galaxy.

What are you talking about? It is in 21 parts for the base game. Eight parts for the DLC. Did you look at it via Galaxy, rather than the website? Galaxy shows the cumulative size, but will download the same split bins.

It is NOT a single file. It is split, just like all the other Windows installers, so you could safely spread out the download. Although I must admit that a data cap in 2024 sounds unusual to me, outside of maybe some mobile phone contracts.

Thank God for that. I was worried that I'd have to run the gauntlet of a huge download and praying that it doesn't fail. I still have nightmares about trying to download a single 90MB file back in 1999 and losing my connection about half an hour before it was supposed to be done.

I know that you can do it with Galaxy but it seems pointless to install Galaxy just to download the offline installers with one-click. I really think that option should be available in the website too.

Yes, it wasn’t easy to find anyone willing to offer me the features that I wanted.

(I don’t have any use for Big Data in my personal life, thanks, I have a plethora of information without the temptation of unlimited data, at $600+ per annum. To say nothing of the increased attack surface and the damage it would do to my security posture.)

A 77GB (=71GiB) file seemed a little extreme. I guess I could manually carve the file, once it was downloaded, too. But, as you noted (vide infra), a bunch of smaller files is far more convenient than one humongous one. (Even if one argued about potentially wasted disc space due to the large sector mapping of modern drives, storage is the cheapest factor in any IT system.)

Yep, totally agree. As long as the file is carved into smaller blocks (4GiB is FAT32 backward compatible, so that seems sensible) I don’t have an issue. :) FAT32 is ubiquitous on storage media, like phones and cameras. That means there are potentially all sorts of ramifications to just abandoning that standard.
That is an interesting point of view.

You are advocating for a future-facing policy on a site that (ostensibly) caters to those collecting the older games. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that but you seem a little cavalier about the unknown consequences of such a policy.

As you say, preferably the option would be for us, the consumer to decide.

I suspect the loss of backwards compatibility is inevitable (with the unstoppable march of obsolescence through the IT industry) but doesn’t the PS4 have trouble playing the original PlayStation games? Any change would lead to losses. (We would rely on BeamDog-alikes to update the kernels.)

The game you mentioned looks interesting. (It seems popular, too, with an expansion to a sequel.) I like the concept. :)

It depends on who your provider is. On my high speed at home I can get unlimited downloads, but that costs a pricy premium.

At my relatives they have downloads up to a GB in speed, but also have a maximum that they can only use 300 GB a month, with up to 1TB if they pay a lot more for that extra.

Out in the rural areas where I have a house, I have to use Hugh's Net for internet and they have a 50GB cap for the month. You can pay extra (it's something like $1 per extra GB you have stored up) if you expect you'll use more, but it can be pricey to do that. There is no normal internet out there, it's satellite or nothing at all.

I negotiated a landline with the bundle and the whole package is $50/month. Unfortunately I will have to move on pretty soon and I have no idea how to replace it.
I have no need for the space. Apart from the occasional game download (where I regularly use my entire quota in 24 hours) I have barely used the capacity I have. Until I started back a university (and bought a new laptop that needed to have it's entire OS levelled up) and all the associated (Microsoft, for Turing's sake!) apps that I had to install to participate in what is now the status quo for tertiary studying, I had no need of any download capacity. (I don't stream entertainment.)

That sounds very similar to the rural areas of Australia. (It's why we had a national airline, from my state, so early on.) Without satellite connectivity most of those who don't live in the cities would have close to zero access to the Interwebs. (Which is crazy: a couple of months ago there was a general satellite outage and 96%* of the combine harvesters went offline.)




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* It may appear otherwise but I did not make up this statistic.

Just to expand on this, even though most PCs won't be using FAT32 on their hard disks, it is still quite common on USB sticks as a lowest common denominator filesystem (accessible by pretty much every version of Windows, MacOS or GNU/Linux/Unix) so limiting files to this size avoids problems for customers transferring files via USB sticks.

ExFAT would be the next best choice (16EiB maximum filesize rather than 4GiB) but is only natively supported by Windows 7 or later (Windows XP requires KB955704 installed for ExFAT support).

To be fair, GOG doesn't seem to be concerned with supporting dead operating systems.

At least that sort of thing will give Professor Freeman and the resistance a bit of respite.
Joking aside, this is why I think the 'internet of things'(putting internet on fridges/etc) is one of the stupidest ideas ever.

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GOG still uses 4GB file chunks when their oldest supported Windows OSs don't even use fat32 that much. Odd, that.

This is the single best reason to have installers broken up. Can download as needed or as allowed without having to worry much about failures, corruption or data caps.

I am fortunate enough to have unlimited internet, but have encountered issues with failed large downloads before. Not too long ago I had some hiccup or something with my internet while downloading the Cyberpunk 2077 Legacy version from here (which is a single ≈116GB zip file) and had to restart the whole thing.

GOG has supported resumable HTTP(s) downloads for over a decade. Anyone having to restart a failed download from scratch should ditch their existing client (Galaxy by any chance?) and use a more robust one (if your browser can't handle it then there are plenty of download managers, e.g. Free Download Manager, that can).

Pretty sure staff see enough traffic from 32bit systems to know it is still used. Linux systems. Tablets, phones and small computing machines like RaspberryPi. Plus the other reasons as mentioned before me. I doubt it makes sense to lose customers for a few whiners, that add no incentive to change.