Posted April 14, 2018
BKGaming: I feel like GOG is damned if they do or damned if they don't. People complain that Galaxy offline installers are less of a priority now for GOG since Galaxy released, but even when GOG takes action to help offline installers and to make the experience arguably better they still get complaints.
AB2012: Depends on what the reason for the "installer refresh" update is. One thing I've suspected is "updated installers" simply means rotating the internal banner adverts that show in offline installers for other GOG games whilst the game is being installed. If that's the case, then having to re-download dozens of multi-gigabyte games on a regular basis for the sake of swapping out half a dozen 30kb JPG's and changing their links seems like a tremendous waste of time and bandwidth. Surely a better way would be just to have identical universal Advert1, Advert2, etc, links in the files themselves to adverts hosted online and then GOG could just swap the adverts they link to around on the site without needing to mess around with doing so for each installer. Changing installer banner ads around may or may not be the reason, but if it is then it seems like another case of over-complicated "make-work" by GOG staff. In this case, GOG is updating the internal installer structure of each game on GOG. From my understanding, this is a change that allows the game to be packaged once for Galaxy and then the offline installer is made from that package, rather than the game being packed for Galaxy and then having to be repacked again simply for the installer. This means new offline installer builds will release faster, possibly right after releasing on Galaxy with no huge delay. It probablly also makes automatting the process possible.
Some games will simply never recieve update again, but GOG probably still wants to have them all on the new structure.