This isn't accurate. You can't get the installers. You can only rollback to a few previous versions if the game is installed. There is no way to access the installers that I'm aware of.

If you want to be correct not matter what - whatever, you win.

If you look at thread's name "Can you download older versions of games" - then you should know that the rollback versions are actually downloaded through GOG Galaxy.

Lastly I haven't even mentioned anything about installers in case you haven't notice.

[EDIT, missed some words]

P.S.Why even put those "installers" into the discussion in the first place and to prove what point exactly? Ugh!

Gog not making every game they currate archival, as in, have many previous versions should be obvious to why. It would require to much money for so many versions to distribute to so many customers.

Knowing the gog crowd. There are many here that would download every archive in full. As crazy as that may seem. Im certain there are many that would. That opens up a huge amount of problems, when many games can be as large as 100GB.

Imagine even 500 customers grabbing 6TB of extra data for the "just in case" way of thinking. Its not a big deal when 20 people do it. But gog is a business. Not a library. My point is, each person must do this for personal use. It makes sense for a public distributor. But gog is a business that gains nothing by allowing previous version to be had.

I see it from a different angle. Imagine for a moment that gog would firmly state that "making games last forever" would also cover every version of each game becoming available for download (from the point where they were introduced to the store, obviously). If user trusts gog enough, he/she won't download every single build since they are available indefinitely* for when such occasion arises that one needs a certain build. E.g. because of compatibility problem, censorship, cut content, specific mods, etc.
*for pr and simplicity-sake

Now if you don't have this luxury or users don't trust gog enough to uphold their stance, I would bet that there is a way greater bandwidth usage, because anxiety/fomo/ocd/commonsense/whatever kicks in to be rather safe than sorry. I.e. the "just in case" crowd as you put it downloads much more this way.

I don't blame anyone for backing up everything btw, at least based on how things currently stand. I'm offsetting this by downloading very little, if anything... sometimes to my own detriment, since galaxy rollback has its drawbacks and limits.

Yes and No.

It would require knowing how many would and how many wouldn't, and I bet that most wouldn't bother. Hell, a lot don't even bother downloading the Offline Installer files.

A select few would do it, but by my estimation that would be quite a small group, and they won't all be doing it at the same time for the same game, except in rare circumstances, like a free game perhaps.

You also have to consider the cost of drives to accommodate such extra versions, so even if many would ideally like to download them, they cannot afford to, or might just do it for games that mean the most to them.

And it is very likely that games with lots of huge files will be bypassed in many instances.

So in reality, accessing such an archive of older versions, would mostly be done by folk that need an older version due to some issue that might require a rollback. So in other words they do it when needed, not before.

GOG could easily make archives of older versions unavailable during big sales, maybe even reduce their access to off-peak.

Oddly i've seen an archived 'older versions and patches' but not through an 'official source'.

Funny one might have to resort to piracy to get an older version of a game...

What I want to know is:
Why they offer older versions through Galaxy, but not to Offline Installers users, if they in fact do? :(

They really should just offer incremental patches, and every 10 versions or something is a fully patched version so you can get to an exact version you want fairly quickly. Though this is less likely for 95%+ of people, still having the versions to compare can be beneficial, especially in cases like RockStar who decide to delete copyrighted music because they don't want to pay the license anymore for new copies sold.

As for why Galaxy allows the last 4 versions, i'm not sure, probably what i do on my folders putting older versions of stuff in a depreciated folder, and when i need space removing that.

From what others have described to me, the versions offered through Galaxy are "Galaxy installations" and not actual installers the way the offline installers are.

Regardless, my general belief is that everything on this store makes more sense if you abandon hope that GOG is in any way like they were in the beginning and adopt the premise that GOG cares more about pushing the precious Galaxy client than anything else, including DRM-free gaming itself (in fact, this specific point is self-evident in the sense that verification checks of some sort are baked into how the client works to gate various content/multiplayer/etc). If you observe long enough, you'll see the preferential treatment Galaxy seems to get around here.

Under the above logic, any reason no matter how big or small a reason that gets another user on Galaxy is a "win" for GOG, as then the "Galaxy users total" goes up by one. GOG can then point to how many people supposedly love Galaxy and pave the way for more Galaxy pushing, possibly even openly DRMed games in the future (this is my opinion). To have offline installers of older versions would be counterproductive under this belief, since then less people would be incentivized to "just use Galaxy(tm)" and its numbers wouldn't get padded to the same degree.

Unfortunately this logic makes a lot of sense.

Dealing with the House Flipper Patching Scheme was driving me mad. You have to compare build numbers in an appinfo file.

And here i'd hope all patching files were put in individual folders in numerical order so you don't have to compare build numbers, they are just in the right order.

Course a 'patch' could just be a zip file replacing whole files with newer ones if there's changes to files that aren't worth nitpicking smaller details.

Nope! You get to download 3 GB. Incrementally.

Skyrim is probably the biggest offender in this, yes, as its years of modding has shown that Steam forced updates breaking mod compatibility caused real harm to the community.
That's why so many people were really happy when Skyrim finally came to GOG and modders ran to update their tools, frameworks and so on to GOG version too, as its like a 'one time job', as of now, we can theoretically, update all mods to one single "definitive" fully drm-free, version.

Albeit people could patch their own game to an older Skyrim version on Steam, this was not practicall at all depending on the user, so, yeah, this is a huge plus for modding community.