It works so well, I'm going to donate. Maybe tomorrow. o.O

In this case, gog should start stickying threads like this for a week or three, because it takes mere seconds before it'd get pushed from the front page & into the back of beyond ;)

Rest in Spaghetti, forgertti yesterday.

3 hours isn't much of a window.

Sometime in the last 6-8 months or so I had a game that had broken GOG downloader links and contacted GOG support for it, giving complete details. They gave me a sort of boilerplate support response that said things in it that made it sound to me like they had not even read my entire support request. That kind of irked me so I politely wrote back to indicate that and got a human support response apologizing for the boilerplate response and giving me more details.

He told me that he'd pass the request to the engineering team to fix the links but that they will be phasing out GOG Downloader at some point in time but had no plans to intentionally remove at the present time (about last summer). He encouraged me to use Galaxy to download instead, or the web interface because eventually GOG Downloader would be retired.

Having said that, GOG does have a default response lined up for problem reports about GOG Downloader which are basically their official stance - to use the website or Galaxy, and that broken downloader links are very low priority to fix.

They did fix the problem within about a week, but as time goes on a week could turn into several weeks or a month or more. I suspect the more problems that arise and the more people complain about it being broken, the sooner they will have an internal meeting to which the results are likely to be something like this:

"Ok, we have left GOG downloader working as-is for a long time now because it just happened to work even though we don't support it and weren't in a rush to get rid of it since it works and some people prefer it. As time has went on however it has broken in more and more subtle ways and we've handled these unsupported issues as a low priority but eventually resolved them. Now however, we are getting more and more inundated with problem reports about just how broken it is, and since we stated all along that it is officially unsupported and we're not planning to devote any more resources to fixing it - the time has come to completely pull the plug so that people aren't given a false impression that it is supported or should work at all anymore."

I posted a thread in the GOG forums not long after the info I mentioned at the top of this post, where I suggested that anyone who wants to see GOG Downloader have as long a life as possible either for themselves, or on behalf of others that still use it - should set the program to always start at OS startup and leave it running 24/7 so that GOG sees as many people as possible using it for statistical purposes. The idea was that the more people are using it, the longer they're likely to keep it around "unsupported". I still keep it running myself for this reason even though I never use it unless Galaxy is not working which is rare for me (and Judas usually fixes whatever is broken within a few hours).

We've known the day would come in which GOG Downloader would officially retire for good, and while that day is not yet among us I believe that it isn't far away. Most likely it could be when Galaxy 1.2 comes out or perhaps the next release, but they're not going to keep downloader around if it is broken and requires resources to fix as they've declared already for several years now that they consider it unsupported and "as-is". I too wish this was not the case, but I accept it and that they're very unlikely to change their minds about this.

The best that people can do for managing their game downloads and updates here is to either use Galaxy, or to use their favourite web browser directly to download the files manually, or to use gogrepo.py (which I believe someone is currently forking and doing their own alternative version of as well), or to use one of those custom downloader browser apps or similar.

In the mean time people can funnel problem reports with GOG downloader to GOG support, but quite frankly they're going to just repeat what I said in this post here and eventually people have to choose one of the other alternatives and try to resolve any problems they have with it via support/mantis etc.

We're likely going to see additional options forthcoming in the future as people have been reverse engineering the Galaxy APIs and posting info here in the forums. As bleak as some of this might sound to some folks, while there might be a grey period of time going forward, I think we'll soon have more options than we ever did within the next year or two and GOG downloader will be laughed at by all in the end. :)

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Why is the Downloader preferable to Galaxy?

Because the downloader isn't still in beta.
Because I don't want to test some software that could fuck up everything in a big way (like when folk uninstalled one game but galaxy decided to uninstall everything like when galaxy decided to uninstall all games in a folder, not just gog ones.).
Because I can open downloader & not have to rush to pause ALL games being updated & screwing up my current installs or to completely screw up our mods that may not work with a newer version of the game. Apparently there's going to be (or is it in already?) an option to not update unless someone clicks it to be updated) but again, someone will have to open galaxy, rush pause everything, enter settings & look for it.
Similarly, if I just want to DL one game, I don't have to load something unneccesary. I don't need a chat function, achievements (sheesh, why do people even want those?) etc.
Because this is a site that's meant to be DRM free.

That's not an absolute thing. The majority of GOG's customers prefer Galaxy, however many who started out with GOG Downloader are more than happy with it and don't want something else. They just want it to keep working as-is and to have the website continue to provide links that work with it.

Others have very old computers with limited resources and find modern game clients like Galaxy/Steam/Uplay/Origin etc. which are based on mainstream web browser technologies (Google Chromium Embedded Framework) to consume far more resources than they can afford to give to a program like this. They just want a simple downloader that is lightweight on resource consumption on their legacy systems.

There are a very small number of people who are still using the unsupported Windows XP also, and Galaxy does not officially support that operating system any more so they're unable to use it and would like to use GOG Downloader instead.

So some people have some good reasons for wanting to continue to use GOG Downloader in the end, and they can still do so for the time being. But they'll increasingly have problems over time as it bit-rots.

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Is it safe? Does it cause any problems in Firefox? Also, is the link for certain safe to download from?

Thanks for the info.

What are you talking about?
GOG downloader is working fine with CoR.

Not necessarily, on the GOG side of the equation is a CDN network that has multiple computers in different regions of the world so two people downloading the same thing are going to get two completely different servers. It is not uncommon for one or more servers to be out of sync or have server-specific or region specific problems that lead to the users who hit that server having problems regardless of whether everyone else in the world seems to be able to access the given file from their own location.

That is the nature of using CDNs for distribution. The same is true for any online service that is large enough to start using a CDN, and is for example why Facebook sometimes looks completely different due to some new feature for some users that other users do not have yet. GOG Galaxy also uses a CDN although it is a different network than what the website/Downloader use.

There will always be problems that can happen like this for a fraction of the customers due to this, even if it works fine for everyone else.

https://www.gog.com/downloader/listing/the_chronicles_of_riddick_assault_on_dark_athena

This is the link to access the games downloader files.
It sends me to a 404 page, nothing else.