With games getting bigger and bigger. Would be nice if GOG offered a service where customers could pay a bit more to be sent a USB drive with the installation files for a game on it (Encoded of course).

GOG would surely lose money if they did that and so it's not worth it.

And internet speeds have also been getting faster and faster and keeping pace with how games are getting bigger and bigger, so bigger games is also a moot point in that way too, since modern internet speeds can still download any very big game fastly & easily.

That's arguable depending on what country and what region in said country you are talking about.

That's absurd. You want to send a thumbdrive across oceans, across the vast plains of Europe, and at great cost to you and GOG, just to have a physically distributed licence to install a game?

You just reinvented a more logistically expensive Sneakernet. Wake me when you have the brilliant idea to attach IPv6 via carrier avian.

When you say a 'bit' more, how much do you have in mind? 60€? 70€? More?

That would only work well for small games anyway, but try to immagine the price for a USB stick that 's able to hold Shadows of Mordor (~160GB) or Cyberpunk. And of course it has to be written to the stick by someone and then sent via mail - with insurance of course.

... and then immagine a game updated.
Who would pay the costs for sending it again? I have heared much worse :)

Remember ~10 years ago when some US genius politician had the bright idea to tax internet traffix? She suggested 1$ per GB. A quick calculation showed that for many games even back then it would be cheaper to copy the game to a hard drive, send it via UPS and then destroy the hard drive after delivery.

A good example is from a couple of weeks ago, when I was in Thailand. My internet was mainly restricted to a cheap-ish data SIM whose top speed was capped to 4 Mbit/s. That was enough for generic use (even watching HD Youtube videos, barely), but a true pain in the butt if I wanted to download e.g. a 10-20GB GOG game installer.

So what I did e.g. in one instance was that when I was elsewhere where there was a free WIFI available that offered 20-30Mbit/s download speed, and I had to hang around there for a couple of hours anyway, I downloaded the GOG offline installers for a couple of games there, into my phone's memory (I had enough space left in the phone storage), using the Chrome browser in the phone.

Then when I get back to my place, I transferred the downloaded installers to my laptop via an USB cable, and installed the games on the laptop. Thank god for the offline installers, and the ability to download them with a generic web browser, it really gives some extra options to download your games.

It is odd how sometimes, if you merely want to move bigger files between two computers over a network, is so complicated that it is just simpler to copy them to an USB thumbdrive or SSD, and copy them from there to the other computer. Especially if the two computers don't share the same operating system, and/or the computers are not in the same subnet (hence they are probably both behind NAT etc.).

I had this need several months ago, and in the end the "easiest" way was to use Dropbox or Google Drive or some similar "proxy storage", ie. I uploaded it there (hoping that it fits on the free online storage so that I don't have to pay up), and the other person downloaded it from there.

One would expect it to be much simpler overall, just connect with your friend over the internet with some OS-agnostic app or tool, and upload the big files to them. In fact, to me it appears it was simpler a long time ago, e.g. I recall uploading some bigger file from my PC to friend's PC over internet, using MSN messenger or similar.

Apparently e.g. Skype allows you to send files to other user(s), but there is a 300MB file size limit. Why is there such a limit?

https://www.easeus.com/pc-transfer/fastest-way-to-transfer-files-from-pc-to-pc.html

Mate, it's probably cheaper to buy pre-paid mobile data to download the game than it is to have a thumb-drive shipped.

Prolly because Skype is Skype for Business and runs on the back of Azure. Dang, I haven't thought about Skype since...2015?

I was just trying to think of some well-known application which is available for several OSes (even Linux) that possibly could be used for transferring files too from computer A to computer B over internets.

Not sure if you have some more modern simple app in mind instead? MS Teams, is it simple to just install and setup, just to transfer a couple of 3GB files over it to someone else?

If I needed to transfer some bigger files (that don't fit to free Dropbox or Google Drive) to some other person (who is probably using Windows) over the internet right now, I would probably end up:
- setting up a ssh server on some Linux machine
- creating a non-admin user for him
- do the needed port forwarding on my router so that one can connect from the internet to that ssh server
- instruct the other person how to use WinSCP to connect to my ssh server in order to download the files from there.
- when he is done, undo everything I've done, port forwarding and ssh server etc...

Seems just overly complicated for something as simple and mundane as transferring a couple of files between two computers.

I sometimes also tested whether e.g. "FilePizza" would be simple enough for occasional file transfers, but I didn't get it to work reliably.

https://file.pizza/

I'd prefer boxes with Blu-Rays. You can squeeze 50 GB on a single one so we could have the same situation as we had when CDs were going away, where a game could be on 3+ discs. But it's all a moot discussion. Physical media for games is not coming back no matter what, sad as it is. Would love to keep my library physical, but it's not feasible in today's world. If GOG didn't exist, I would not be buying games anymore.

Why not simply telnet into your terminal of choice and TTY the files over?

"Hello, Police? I have to report my creepy neighbor siferion. Almost everyday, they receive those similar-looking envelopes in the mail. Once, I saw them retrieve an USB-stick from the envelope. That's quite suspicious, if you ask me. Probably terrorists or worse. Yes... yes, thank you for investigating."

You could also use HTTP for this. Set up a web server on your machine (this can be done as easily as "python3 -m http.server" from the command line, assuming you have Python 3 installed), send the other person the URL, then have the other person download it from your machine. This would involes:
* Setting up a web server on the Linux machine (easily done, unless you need password protection or something)
* No need to create a user
* Port forwarding is still needed
* The other person already knows how to use a web browser, and just needs to click on the link to download. (There might be a security prompt or something, but that can be ignored/bypassed on the other end, particularly since browsers don't treat http as harshly as insecure httos.)
* If using that python3 server, undoing it is just a matter of pressing Ctrl-C from the terminal running the server, and there isn't the need to remove a user because you didn't have one. Still need to undo port forwarding, however.