I'm not sure how to do refunds here, either I've forgotten or haven't done one. But can I get a refund for a game that I downloaded the stand-alone files already? I can delete them, obviously, but, also obviously, there's no way any seller could know that. So I'm guessing I'm screwed?

Goddammit it seems everything in life just goes in one direction... worse. Never better.

I buy a game that looks intriguing, download all 12 GB's, install it (and when did installing a game taking a half hour become a thing?) and then try to play it.... and while I admit to being a complete tech moron, I am not a completely stupid person. I've been playing video games since the 1970's, I have lots of experience.

I swear to Christ if there was a way to exit this game, I haven't found it after looking for 15 minutes. Both times I started it the only way I could find to end it was to hit Ctrl-Alt-Enter, go into task manager, and end the task.

The first time I tried it, it said "press a key on the keyboard or the controller to choose your default device" so I hit a key on my controller. A start-up screen then came up.... where my controller had NO effect. Tried every button and stick and pad on it, nothing. Nor would keyboard work. Task manager quit. Start again.

This time I click my mouse button to start things, and this time at the start up screen it does register and I can move the cursor around and make selections but thought okay I want to quit and read some stuff before starting and once again, I could find NOTHING on how to quit the game. Tried escape, the letter q, every F button at the top... and had to Ctrl-Al--Enter again to quit.

I have NO DESIRE to reward a company that makes that. I want a refund. Do you think I can get one or because I downloaded the stand alone files I'm screwed?

I think I'm just gonna stick with games from back in the day from now on.

"The updated policy lets you refund a product up to 30 days after purchase, even if it was downloaded, launched, and played. Yes, you read that correctly."

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006129837-GOG-Voluntary-Refund-Policy?product=gog

Wow, color me surprised. Thank you. Going to see if I can do that right this second. Thanks again.

ADDED: Request submitted. See what happens.

And I'd still like to know when installing a game that's already downloaded taking a half an hour became a thing. Sometimes on Steam it can take that long when you hit the "install" button, but that's because it's downloading and installing and the downloading takes a majority of the time. Here, I had already downloaded all 5 files (one setup file and four bin files, which now that I think about means 16GB instead of 12 since each bin file is 4 GB, except the last one which was 3.1, so I guess it's about a 15.1GB download. I waited through that, then hit setup and I swear I don't recall any game, even big new ones, taking so long to install. Is this now a thing with new games? It took almost as long to install as it did to download.

Many game installers these days are large, and there are multiple small files for the installer to extract.
Such things(combined with things like uncompressing files, if needed), can sometimes lead to a longer install time.
(also a number of GoG games have integrity checks, which can almost double the install times in some cases)

Can you tell us the game?

Don't be nosy!

A couple of days ago I did run into a GOG game where I was wondering "How the heck am I supposed to exit the game?". The normal pushing esc etc. didn't bring any such options in the main menu.

In the end, I found out that in the main menu you needed to move the mouse pointer towards the bottom of the page to get the option to exit the game to desktop. Moving it elsewhere brought only the other portions of the main menu like starting or continuing the game or options etc.

I think the game was "ECHO".

It's often a combination of various factors, e.g. having both source (installers) and final install folder on the same drive during installing, worse even if it is a fragmented hdd. Then you have to take into account the speed of said drive in your system, things like your cpu performance, memory controllers used and even motherboard chipset plays a role depending on your config.

So no, it's not unusual to have longer install time in case of heavily compressed archives, esp for games that have a ton of really small files, running file integrity checks and while doing it all on a 5400rpm hdd that has seen better days as worst case scenario.
Or it might be just that single game acting funky. We work with limited information provided here to begin with.

Older GOG installers (with the nameofgame_2.0.0.x naming format) stored files as actual files. Newer ones (with the nameofgame_number_(xxxxx)) naming format) stores files as Galaxy streams, ie, they are broken up into thousands of tiny chunks with an MD5 checksum for a filename that have to be extracted into a Temp folder to be reconstructed into files first then installed. So 'for Galaxy reasons' the newer Galaxified installers essentially write the whole game to the disk twice over... You can read more about the "Great Idea (tm)" in posts like these:-
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/offline_game_installers_why_use_ctemp/post17
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrappers_news_faq_discussion/post147

addition: That only affects offline installers of course. The Galaxy download does not use the large installer files.

It's not really a new thing, but it does depend on a number of issues as other users have pointed out.

In summary:
- How the installers have been set up by GoG
- Whether you're running the integrity check or have turned it off
- Size of game and file structure
- Location of installer (drive) and target (drive) for installation
- Fragmentation of HDD (assuming you haven't upgraded to a SSD yet)
- Speed of HDD (both in terms of rpm and the controller used - a WD black running at 7200rpm with a dual-core controller processor is appreciably faster than a generic 5400rpm drive sold by AliExpress)
- How full your SSD is (nearer capacity they tend to slow down)
- Whether you're using a SATA or PCIe SSD (and on the latter, thermals of the SSD) - although both of these are fairly marginal

The biggest difference you can make is switching to a SSD and only using HDDs for low cost archiving.

Warhammer, Chaosbane.

First of all, it has an intro that lasts.... I dunno, a long time. I mean... a LONG TIME. I literally hit every key on the keyboard, on the controller, and on my mouse... literally every single key... trying to stop and skip the intro and there was no way I could find. Strike one.

Then after waiting all that time and watching the entire intro, a screen comes up that says "Hit a key on your keyboard or controller to select your default device" or something like that. I hit a button on the controller, the screen refreshed, and then nothing. Pressing every key on the keyboard, mouse, and/or controller resulted in nothing. Absolutely nothing. And before anyone asks, nothing wrong with my controller. I used it in other game before this particular game yesterday and after this particular game yesterday... controller works fine. Strike two.

Since no key on the keyboard, mouse, or controller would give me a menu with an option like quit or cancel, I had to ctrl-alt-enter to task manager to quit the game. Loaded the game again, AGAIN waited through this long, long... LONG intro, AGAIN hitting every goddamned key on the keyboard and mouse and controller but nothing stops the long intro. Then when the screen game up asking me to select my default device this time I pressed a key on the mouse and then the same startup screen appeared to pick my character as before but this time it did recognize my input device and allowed me to select my starting character. So that's when I decided to quit the game and read the manual.... and again, there must be a way to end the game but I again hit every key on the keyboard and mouse and nothing... Ctrl-alt-enter to taskbar to end the game. Strike three.

Not giving this company my money for this game, or any other game, ever again.

No point in writing a rant about a game without telling us what it is.


Thanks

Oh yeah, I forgot to say then after quitting to read the manual, discovered of course there was no manual. At the very least a damned manual would've been nice to explain how to skip the fricking intro and how to quit the game without having to ctrl-alt-enter to taskbar and end the task. Hell that could've been a one page reference sheet if they didn't want to do a manual.

But posting to say I dunno about this new refund policy. I just checked and my refund is already showing up in my wallet funds. Yet the game was still installed on my computer. I hadn't uninstalled and deleted the downloaded files yet.

I just now did uninstall it and delete the files (trust me I have NO DESIRE to every fire that up again) but boy... I see that getting abused easily. Hope it doesn't though because in this case I was happy about this policy. It wouldn't surprise me in the future though if it reverted back to only being able to refund games never downloaded or only installed through galaxy and galaxy could then restrict future downloads. Glad the policy was like this today though.

Does alt-f4 work? That should close anything in Windows, barring a freeze of some kind. I'm sure there's a quit hidden somewhere, but alt-f4 should work.

I dunno, and I have now uninstalled and deleted the downloaded files so I can't test it. But if another game ever occurs where quitting is difficult, I'll try that. I did not know about this. Thanks.