8tb drives have actually gone up, due to supply shorts and high demand. Plus I would find the cheap items to be sketchy. I would hazard a guess, they are multiple smaller drives stuffed into a single unit to cut corners in cost.

Absofruitly! Especially if said cosmetics could be sunset in the future, leaving the installer without a toolkit to display. Not even Athena widgets!

But more illustratively, it shows there's been no serious updates to the installer since 2010 and we both know compression tech has seriously upgraded since then.

Has it? It's not something I've really kept up with but I know 7zip came out in 1999. So what's significantly better than that for general purpose compression?

CUSTOMER: The offline installers need work.

GOG: Okay, I'll add that to the list right away.

*car door closes, screeching tires as car leaves*
*two hours of crickets"
*screeching tires as car returns, car door opens*

GOG: Okay, I made it to the end of the list and added it.

I went to download some updated versions of base game installers and it's estimating anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour for download. When did this become a thing?

I used to be able to get them in a few minutes (and I am not intending this as some sort of "brag". I know others have very long download speeds and I wish everyone would have similar access to faster speeds).

Even iterations within that range for a start but more to the point, multithreading was unheard of in 1999, and the dual core CPU was still a madman's dream outside of servers. Rust didn't exist then either; so there's been a ton of programming shifts (just an example). Many of them have likely handled parallelization, compression, and many other things have changed in the over 20 years since 7z.

For most metrics though for your spigot's worth, tar.gz is still near the top though. You iterate on some code from 1979 and 1999 respectively, you get something quite versatile.

Isn't that normal during major sales? And then there was that big CDN snafu earlier. There have been threads popping up about slow speeds ever since really.

Good points. I would've assumed whatever happened during the "snafu" had been fixed, but "I should know better," haha.

Good grief. Just stop.

Hmmm as a side comment on all of this, i kinda prefer games and programs where i can just extract them and use them. Like portable apps. Don't need to install into the OS, or need Registry entries or any such crap.

The second part of that is that it doesn't need a second temporary home while extracting, it writes the files as it extracts, which is a plus.

Third, would be if maybe games had a layout as a mountable ISO, which would be for a large chunk of static data, and depending on the filesystem better cluster layout. In some ways it feels like ripping a CD game and playing it from the computer while it thinks you have a game in the CD-ROM. Thus a handful of needed files and a directory for mods and savegame data, and the rest as a singular block of data.

Yeah, imagine how it feels setting up a RAID drive where it's 4, 10TB drives... Expensive.

Could get several and RAID-0 them. Then you get the best space vs cost.

These threads may give some context to that problem:-

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/offline_game_installers_why_use_ctemp/post1
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/offline_game_installers_why_use_ctemp/post53
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrappers_news_faq_discussion/post147

^ The problem with needing a lot more space (and why some are slow to unpack) is that GOG have "Galaxified" the newer offline installer format. ie, they use InnoSetup but instead of storing files as files, they're stored as "Galaxy stream chunks" which need extracting then reassembling then moving to the game folder which often needs to unpack them into some temporary folder (which if it's on the same drive as the game install folder can slow things down / need double the space). As people have experimented in the past with both 'repacking' the installed game folder as a new InnoSetup installer but storing files just as normal files or simply 7-zipping up the game install folder with solid compression, it's definitely possible to create offline installers that are both faster to install and take up less space. "Galaxy Logistics" is the reason this doesn't happen though...

I tried installing Succubus from offline installers a year or so ago. I think it is around 60GB. It failed, because I do not have so much free space on Windows partition. It did not matter that I had hundreds of GBs free space on the target disk, where I wanted to put the game.
Funnily though, installing from the Galaxy works just fine.

I really hated that change.
The excuse was to speedup the installers creation process, but.. it's still late as before.
This just ruined the offline installers :/

I still got "open possibilities", because i was not cheap on the MB.

https://wccftech.com/msi-x670e-am5-motherboard-prices-confirmed-almost-twice-as-expensive-as-x570-am4-boards/

So, yes, this is basically "my joker" or "my ace". I can go RAID 0 and in theory able to reach a faster sequential speed than a single PCIE 5.0 SSD. However, i worry it might decrease the airflow of my GPU a bit, although the GPU is way bigger than this small RAID 0 capable card and i think the effect is close to zero (maybe the GPU fan need to spin a bit faster, not sure).

Anyway, so far my space is sufficient as soon as i use the free PCIE 5.0. It simply means, there is STILL open potential in the far future.

Still have to add: As long as your MB can not handle such a "card" for whatever reason then making a RAID setup will be useless because it will cut the possible speed, which will be a waste or simply inferior. So you do need such a PCIE-card for this to happen. For me there is not even additional costs as it was "included" and 100% compatible with my board, which is another IMPORTANT factor.

Maybe, and this is now really "maybe": I could even use this Raid 0-card first, and wait for the PCIE 5.0 drive, because 2x4 TB drives are now pretty affordable but a 5.0 drive is just crazy expensive (and still not at the "edge" of possibilities). I have to think about... The "Ace" is basically a humble Goodlike in disguise... still underrated.

Indeed. And, in case of games, that also means putting the saves (and settings, in some cases screenshots and what not) in the game folder instead of needing to search for them all over the user folder until you figure out where the heck that particular game puts them.