Its not GOG, its your ISP that is throttling GOG.
Set your VPN to your local server - you dont need to use USA.

4GB- 20 Hours god work GoG

Nah....

Steam:
95 megabytes per second at all times, no tinkering, it just works

Epic, if I use cloudflare DNS, about 65 to 70, so about 550 mbps, still accaptable (Gigabit connection over wi-fi),

GOG - 10 megabytes per second or 90 ish mbps.

I have tried through Nord VPN and it didn't help.

Any other ideas?

GoG is not as big as Steam, they probably got a few less servers spread accross
the globe.
I just installed Cyberpunk, 82 gig, 28 mins.
No idea why the updater popped at 10% download :P

There is litterally nothing you can do if GoG is the only slow service you have it probably
means the nearest server is not near at all.

What forced bandwidth?
You need to explain that better, as it sounds imaginary to me.

With a VPN, if you have one and it isn't a slow free one, you are just using a different route for your downloading.

If your ISP was truly throttling downloads from GOG, they are just as likely to be throttling them from elsewhere too, which is not the case in my experience.

I can use Free Download Manager 5 with multiple streams per file to get my full download speed, all using that slow GOG server. So you'd think my ISP would throttle that too if they had some imaginary issue with GOG.

And depending on where you live in AUS, you either get a good or bad download speed with GOG now. So I don't think it has anything to do with your ISP, and more to do with your location. If you live on the eastern seaboard of AUS and are close to a city, you probably get a good download speed from GOG.

If I thought for a moment that my ISP was to blame, I would be finding out the ISP and location of others also having the same issue and we could complain collectively to that ISP directly.

But lets be clear about throttling. When you are getting a lower speed than usual on a regular basis, you can call that throttling. However, if you are regular getting 204 KB/s downloads or less, that is something else altogether, and not throttling ... more a blockage or extreme limitation.

I'm in Melbourne and I've been having garbage download speeds from GOG for a long time, to the point where I refuse to recommend them or buy more stuff from them. I've added all the exceptions to Bitdefender they've asked for and more and it just doesn't make any difference. Every other site/platform is fine (I routinely get 6.7MB/s from Steam, I routinely get 1.7MB/s from GOG).

Ed: FWIW, I have a 50Mbps package from Occom on a FTTH estate (Opticomm). Speedtest routinely shows >52Mps, which roughly corresponds to the 6.7MB/s I get from Steam.

The issue is GOG without a doubt, as it would be the user location info they pass onto fastly, and we are either not being redirected to the correct server or that server no longer exists for us, perhaps due to cost saving etc.

I am getting by for the moment, but I am getting very fed up with how they haven't fixed this issue for many months now for us, and this is the second time they have done this to me in the last three years. I too will stop buying games from them shortly if they don't fix the issue, I've already cut back .... their loss not mine, as I have plenty of games to go on with.

EDIT
As for anything AV related, that feels a stretch to me, unless GOG have put something inside the downloads that causes the AV check to run real slow and so hold things up. And I shouldn't be impacted anyway, as both the downloading program and destination folder are marked as exceptions in my AV.

I'm generally not picky about these things and I've never reflected upon download speeds from GOG before, but today when trying to download a 4 GB file and getting a 2 hours estimate, while simultaneously testing and getting 60 Mbps (7.5 MB/s) effective speeds, I've started to have my doubts... This is a browser download and not Galaxy, but anyway.

As I wrote to GOG support, I could most likely buy the game now (at a 33% complete GOG.com download) from Steam and start playing it there before the GOG download finishes. That's...unfortunate.

Surely there are CDNs available around the globe, without GOG having to build their own?


PS. Also, I noticed something interesting: if I run my internet speed test while downloading from GOG, the moment the downlink speed test finishes the GOG.com downloads immediately ramp up in speed, as in going from 400 kB/s to 4.0 MB/s -- that's a factor of 10. Then they gradually slow down again to 300-500 kB/s. Ehhh...?

I just came here to say that I am also experiencing extremely low download speeds. I'm in London UK on a 500Mb/s ethernet connection and trying to install Cyberpunk, GOG is saying I'm averaging 1.7Mb/s. Looking at Windows task manager however, shows that it is hardly downloading anything at all. There is next to nothing going on in my ethernet port at all,. I have run speedtests and I am getting the full 500Mb/s on that so something is going on with GOG downloader. It is not being blocked by Bitdefender as far as I can tell, it's just hardly downloading anything at all for long periods, then it spikes for about a second then nothing again for long periods. I pressed the check for updates (GOG downloader) button and it took 10 minutes I kid you not before it was able to check that indeed there was an app update available. However, updating the downloader has not solved the speed / lack of download activity issue. Any ideas?

UPDATE
Well wouldn't you just know it, after 30 mins of idling, my updater has sprung to life and is now downloading at around 25-35Mb/s. Around half what I ought to be getting but much better than the first 30 minutes. Perhaps my email to GOG support did something or maybe the downloader needs time to calculate disk space or something before ramping up speeds?

Same. Ordered DOS2 and it's about 4 hours in and almost half way loaded. I also noticed that is said it was "gift" to me but I paid 24 dollars. I thought it might be my new computer but I downloaded a game from steam in less than 10 minutes.

Since gog switched to a different CDN provider my (I'm seemingly not alone) download speed has slowed to a crawl, this honestly sucks.

I'm in Perth, my ISP is with Optus and my vpn is with PIA.

My speeds with all the game hubs suck, whether its GOG, Battle.net or Steam. The speeds often crawl to KBytes/s.
Mid-download, I turn on PIA to a local perth server, and the speed always increases to a constant high MBytes/s with no slowdowns.

I have Bitdefender left on. No need to turn off.

Getting 2MB/s here. Wanted to update Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate. This is beyond awful needing days to complete...

Nothing much changed re throughput amount in almost mid 2024.
Enabled my vpn and download speed increased 5 fold then quickly dropped back to kbytes.
GOG need to spend more of our money improving our experience. Slow throughput aka speed
is a web site killer and GOG must be suffering loss of custom, and will continue to suffer loss of
customers until it disappears up it's own Kyber Pass. Wonder if it's actually based in the Ukraine.

I have the opposite "problem" than most people here. I currently have a 600 Mbit/s cable internet connection which costs me 24.90€/month.

Yesterday I learned that the basic internet connection in this house has been bumped up from 10Mbit/s to 25Mbit/s. It doesn't cost any extra so I'd save 25€/month with it.

Now I am contemplating whether I could live with that 25Mbit/s connection. It would be weird in a sense that my phone has max 100Mbit/s speed (doesn't cost me anything, my employer pays for it), while my wife's phone has a max (I think) 300Mbit/s connection (5G; we never get even close that fast as I don't think we are in the area of 5G, 4G here). So I would get a considerably faster internet then if I was tethering the mobile data to the household, instead of using the 25Mbit/s wifi router.

I used to have that 10Mbit/s connection for many many years and I was relatively happy with it, but game sizes have certainly grown since then and downloading something like Cyberpunk or Baldur's Gate 3 would probably be awful with one, always having to wait a night or a day or two to download some big game...

I dunno, I feel I am partly paying for nothing right now since I only occasionally need that high speed, and rarely if ever I am maxing that out anyway (I think I get max 300-400Mbit download speeds from pretty much anywhere). Speedtest.net just ranked my internet connection as having 571 Mbit/s DL speed and 97 Mbit/s UL speed, so at least my ISP is not lying to me apparently...

I wonder if it is possible to throttle the overall speed to 25Mbit/s on the router, that way simulating the experience of being knocked down to 25Mbit/s basic speed?