If you, like me, want to download all of your DotEmu games before they're gone for good (June 1, 2017), then you had better be ready for RIDICULOUSLY slow download speeds. I've been downloading my smaller titles tonight, and it's taken an hour. Average is about 500KBps. That's right, one HALF on ONE MBps. (see first screenshot)

This is using the browser's downloader. When I tried using the download manager I kept getting a "403" error. (see second screenshot) I tried about 5 times before giving up. Usually the download manager will make speeds a little higher, but this is is so slow I guess the download manager just farts... lol.

That's real nice. Contact everyone to tell them they need to download their games... and then provide the slowest possible download experience you can. No wonder they're going out of business. What a joke.

Their bandwidth is probably clogged up by all the people downloading at once.

Yep yep. This is why I consider it a good practise to download the games already beforehand, if you care for your games. Of course if one doesn't care about possibly losing access to one's games, I guess it doesn't matter if and when you download your games.

I have downloaded my DotEmu games already a couple of times (last time last year), so I guess I won't be trying to download them now as everyone else is trying the same. I guess my current set is good, they probably haven't received updates anyway.

That's also why I have already now downloaded my GOG games, even though I don't see GOG being in an imminent danger of closure. I have long time ago downloaded also the few Gamersgate.com games I have, but Humble Bundle game downloads are still not completed (then again there are lots of overlapping there with GOG games; Humble Bundle's Android games I've mostly downloaded already).

For DotEmu though, I wonder why they have such a quick schedule? I understood they are not going under but just closing something that isn't that profitable to them. Since they have already stopped selling games on their store, why not keep the store downloads available somewhat longer?


EDIT: Wait, so is the download speed 500 kBYTES/sec? Hmm, I don't consider that too bad, considering the situation now. After all, my max speed on my cable modem is around 1.2MBytes/s anyway. Maybe I'll redownload my DotEmu games all over again, just in case. Of ccourse if one is accustomed to 10MBytes/s download speeds, that may feel far too slow...

Well. I am getting worse download speeds right now, about 200kB/s, sometimes less. I guess this is the worst time to download though, Sunday morning/midday in Europe. Let's see if I will try to download them anymore, I am pretty sure my existing DotEmu downloads are still up to date even though they were from 1-2 years ago. DotEmu rarely updated their installers.


EDIT: And the first download (Curse The Eye Of Isis) didn't get finished, the download failed after a few minutes. Another download on the side (Inquisition) is still proceeding. Fortunately I downloaded them already before, I'll stop the downloads for now and maybe, just maybe, retry e.g. tomorrow when I expect less users.

Actually while your intent seems to be to do good by informing everyone of the problem, the side effect of that is if everyone does this and informs everyone they know, the servers will get even busier as even more people pile on top to download. Sorry to be the harbinger of bad news, but it is true. :)

Luckily I started to download on friday evening and was done yesterday lunchtime. At some point I had 10-12 downloads at the same time, big files like the Silverfall installers I did overnight. I already had everything relevant backed up and mirrored, but as I edited the installer to remove unnecessary stuff and save disc space I thought it's better to have also the original and untouched on another external hard drive, just to be save. While the download speed for every single file was low the total speed was fine.

I don't even know if I have a DotEmu account, or any of their games on it. A quick look tells me I don't have a password stored, so that probably means no account. Ah well, so the installers are stand alone? That means plenty of people will be downloading their copies, so nothing would be lost for posterity.

That is why I always download GOG offline installers immediately after buying games here.

In the hopefully unlikely event GOG ever went out of business, they'd probably take measures to ensure game download availability for some months, but with the massive number of customers they too would probably end up with their servers being DoS'd due to sheer volume of inbound connections and bandwidth sucking downloads maxing out their available bandwidth non-stop until cutoff.

Problem is too that many people have hundreds of games, and in the best of times it can take weeks to download all of one's games without going over Internet caps or other limitations, not to mention whether someone has all of the hard disk space to store stuff. IMHO it definitely is smart to keep a local backup of everything on reliable storage of some sort and keep it updated if one can afford to do so, because downloading 300 games after a "we're going out of business" announcement where the games total 800GB or whatever... good luck doing that at 200kB/s... hehehe

Like some people have already mentioned, it's good practice to download a game at the time you buy it, so you're safe at any time and the hundreds of hours downloading hundreds of gigabytes of games are spread out across all the years you're a customer. To anyone being a GOG customer, better safe than sorry. It's not likely for GOG, but any store might be faced with a shutdown. Best be prepared. I know I am.

*edit: and don't forget to have at least 1 backup that's not connected to your PC and to be most safe, have an offsite backup at a friend's place (because any house might catch fire or get burgled), with a HDD stored at your family's place or alternatively with a cloud service (but any cloud service faces the danger of shutdown as well).

I used to download all my gog.com games and back them up, but Galaxy came along and I ended up getting lazy. T_T

I keep telling myself that I'll grab gogrepo.py and recreate my backup from the beginning, but I always end up postponing it.

As for DotEmu, I find it sad that they're closing the store, but it's understandable. At least they're doing it because they found a business model that works better for them, instead of, you know, going bankrupt.

This is my "usual" day. (see screenshot)

500KBps is nowhere close...

If you mean 500kbps, that's close to my normal download speed for everything. If you mean 500kBps as written, I would love to have that speed right now.

Many other customers looking at the calendar, making sure to get their stuff before the deadline. Hopefully the site lets you queue things up so you can keeping it going all night long.

Yes, I mean 500K"B"ps, as written. Usually ISP's advertise their download rates in Mb/s (or Kb/s) whereas download speeds when downloading games and such show up as MB/s (or KB/s).

In my case, I normally, all the time, no exceptions, get over 30 M"B"/s when downloading from Steam, and usually (albeit not always) at least 12M"B"/s when downloading from gog (that's using Firefox's download manager "Down Them All"). I've been tempted to try Galaxy just to see if it's faster.

But yes, I mean the big B, the byte, not the bit.

ADDED: And I do feel for those that are posting how they'd love to have this speed or that speed. I do. I understand. I had dial up for YEARS. I get it.

But the point is that if you're getting that speed it's because your ISP is limiting it. Not DotEmu. In my case, I have the capability of downloading huge speeds, but DotEmu is sllllllllllllooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww. That's my complaint. Many have every right to complain about their ISP speeds. But the point is even if you had speeds like mine, you would get shit speeds at DotEmu.