I must say, I was one of those, who wanted the unbundling to happen.
But not like this and certainly not for all of these games.
It's turning my online library of games into a ... problem.(Though I could have used a harsher word)
We need a better sorting mechanic and tags.
I love you GOG, but this is a mess.

Well, with the way things are now, I definitely believe that some of the games need retitling, especially for those who like to sort their shelves by title.

My candidates so far:

Beyond Zork -> Zork, Beyond
Historyline 1914-1918 -> Battle Isle - Historyline 1914-1918
Incubation -> Battle Isle - Incubation
Return to Zork -> Zork, Return to
The Black Mirror -> Black Mirror, The
The Blackwell Legacy -> Blackwell Legacy, The
The Dig -> Dig, The

There are probably others that I've missed. As for the Sid Meier games, I'm not sure which system to go with, since GOG have mixed those up as well.

For example:

Colonization, Sid Meier's
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Sid Meier's Covert Action

At least the Tom Clancy games have a uniform structure: Tom Clancy's <name of game>

GOG: You guys should consider taking the opportunity to collapse the free and paid Ultima 4 variants into a single entry. It's confusing that there are now two entries in my library for the same game, with different installer versions of different sizes. How do I know which is the most up-to-date? It's both a maintenance issue for GOG and an ambiguity issue for customers.

Again, that depends on what you mean by that.

lgogdownloader can download, repair, or check either all games or a specific subset of your library and it lets you customize the pattern used to build target paths from game metadata, but it doesn't have any kind of mechanism for storing per-game path overrides.

However, it IS a command-line tool, so if you want that and know any kind of scripting (shell, Python, Perl, etc.), you can implement it fairly simply by using --list to get a list of games, then calling lgogdownloader multiple times with different --game options to specify per-game overrides.

While I have been a rather vocal opposition to this move from day one, I believe I can explain why it makes sense from GOG's perspective.

In some respects d2t (who is a rather vocal supporter) summarised it well in post #936:
"[addressing a user complaining about the unbundling] Admit it already that all you care is convenience of downloading everything from your library to satisfy your backing up needs and you have zero care for typical user of GOG who simply wants to download and play a single game from their library."

I freely admit it. Of course it is more important for me to be able to back up my library for the day when GOG disappears. I myself never download a game when I want to play it. I just install it from my up-to-date backup. Which is one reason why I do not plan to use Galaxy, since it would never know where to find my backups (I use my own names for directories and my own non-flat tree structure).

GOG does not really want to make it easier for us to backup files. See, for example, it forcing us to download 3.5 GB of Heroes Chronicles instead of 660 MB. GOG would greatly prefer if all of us just downloaded our games only when we wanted to play them and deleted them when we're done (the "typical user" according to d2t). That would tie us much more strongly to GOG, essentially making us dependent on its continued existence, and that is the important thing for GOG, not our convenience. That would probably also reduce the load on its servers.

Perhaps d2t is right and this is the typical user. I am pretty sure this is the typical user on Steam because that comes naturally as a result of using a client.

I myself believe there are quite a few "atypical" users on GOG. Unfortunately, I have come to realise recently that GOG considers these more of a thorn in its side than an asset. It also probably knows that many of those don't really have any alternative to GOG...

I searched for "unbundled" on "The what did just update?" thread, but I seem to have missed them. Should remind myself to not trust the search function blindly. :P

The in-thread search never returns more than 100 hits, I believe. And I am sure there are more than 100 posts mentioning "unbundled" in that thread, since I alone contributed more than 70.

I wish I had the time and resources to write an alternative forum search engine. I already have a name for it: DemaGogue.

I would name it DemoGOGon, based on the demon prince from one the bestselling games here. :P

I assume the current one must be GOGzilla then, as it wades through the forum, and completely destroys any meaningful results you might have received! :-)

I can't believe you guys unpacked the M&M bundle too! Now what the hell am I going to send a girl when she asks me for a shot of my 6-pack?

I respectfully disagree. That's not summarising it well; that's a typical bit of website snarkery, where rather than counter the opposing opinion with a reasoned argument, he just attempts to invalidate the other opinion with a mildly ad hom rebuke and an appeal to bias by saying "you don't care about what I want". I'm kinda tired of rot like that.

And the reason I said I find this disgusting is because of GOG's deliberate misrepresentation of what it's doing. If it feels this is its best move forward, then that's its call, and GOG gets to make it. But it needs to state that, and let customers make their choice about how they feel about it. It's the patronising and transparent attempt to mislead customers that is (quite obviously!) getting up my nose, and that I feel the need to speak up about.

Others don't feel this way; that's fine, and if it suits the way they want to run their use of games, then good luck to them. But GOG is already changing the system to suit them, and without regard for those who *don't* want to remain tethered to a website for their downtime from the outside world, so for people like d2t to be crying "poor me" because other people have a different response to his/hers is just ridiculous.

For myself, I've bought the games I wanted, some of them in bundles I was happy with, and that should be that. For GOG to retroactively change what I have, without telling me, let alone asking me or giving me the option to keep what I have -- for instance, if I want any further updates that come out, I have no choice but to redownload all the games in that bundle and manage separate games ad duplicated installers -- is, at the very least, a breach of faith with its customers. I don't follow the logic of that. If anything, wouldn't that *increase* the load on the servers, as well as *increasing* people's use of bandwidth and the size of their downloads? (So much for GOG's claim that this will lead to smaller downloads, which is patent rot in any case.) The difference is that they're the conditions under which a person made a purchase from Steam, knowingly and willingly. If people want to run their games under the Steam model, than perhaps they should have bought them from Steam in the first place. If GOG wants to change its busiiness model, then perhaps it should have drawn a line in the sand and said "From date X, all releases will be handled this way", let those who want to play that way move their library over to the tethered model,and for the rest of us leave our existing libraries bloody well alone. That would have been honest and respectable. It's the heavy-handed unilateral changes and the deceptive, coercive spin that I'm objecting to.

You're right about there being few alternatives. But GOG already lost my trust when it introduced regional pricing after promising it never would and then bunged a considerable GOG-favouring loading onto the exchange rates it uses. Now, alternatives or not, I'll be thinking long and hard before I buy anything more from GOG.

I already pointed out, gog right know mostly care to have their website designed for galaxy ;

so in the end one game per entry, and no more bundle (except a few cases) -> they could have unbundled those games, and created as many download link for each game under a bundle entry.... that would have allowed to backup those games more easily and also would have sastified those would wanted to download only one game in the bundle.

if you know what's a typical gog's user ; personnaly i don't. .... your description of a gog's user is a user which download a game , play it, and delete it. : yes i know there are some people which are short on disk space, but many games affected (especialy the oldest) doesn't take a lots of space. -> and it's quite funny because the total spece of a bundle in many cases is less for a bundle than for each game added seperatly.....

GOG doesn't communicate at all (except Ciris), we don't know if they are going to screw more the shelves or if they are going to improve them.... i wait an answer because actually i don't have the feeling to be heard.... and i personnaly i fed up with GOG's lack of communication in many levels.....

Y'all may have to make some tough choices in the future.

(I'm not speaking regarding anything specific, just that it's possible you'll have to decide if you want to keep supporting GOG or not. Personally nothing bothers me yet, but I don't have 100s of games nor do I worry about backing them up.)

Will we get bad karma if we make the wrong choice? :P