That's what I was about to tell you! I was interested in that game, specially in the DOS version, hope they re add it soon! :/

GoG have done a great job for gaming rights and game preservation. I hope that they will continue to do a great job.

On that topic, it isn't acceptable to remove a package that people paid for when adding a newer one, such as with a product upgrade, re-release, etc. People are still own and are entitled to the package that they originally purchased the game to play.

Lots of people, including myself, choose to buy from GoG for the safety of our purchases, the reliability and posterity of access to the classic games as they were. If GoG start failing to ensure that games (including game packages) we purchase on their platform remain, then that undoes the truth and sense of security which GoG has built and which many of us choose to buy from GoG for.

It will be a tragedy if now we have to worry about GoG removing game packages, including for the offline installers.

Dammit, I really need to start back-up things don't I? Someone got the original for me maybe?

Last a demo was ripped from accounts as well already...

You should back up your games immediately after purchase, I never understood why people don't.

Reportedly, the SNES version isn't downloadable as it leads to a 404 error.

They also kept "This game is powered by DOSBox" in the system requirements.

I hope I'm not overly optimistic thinking this is just an oversight that will be corrected.

Because backing up hundreds, or even thousands of games, some of which are 50+ GB in size, isn't feasible for many people. And if you want your backups to be safe, you should have at least 2 copies of your backups (though, the saying is, "if your backup doesn't exist in 3 places, then it doesn't exist"), and store them in different places. That's costly for an individual, and sometimes people don't even have another place they can store a redundant backup in.

A part of the service that GoG provides is backup of people's games for them, while making the previous versions available. That security of posterity should be a dependable part of what GoG offers, and in their customers' minds, it is.

If GoG remain true to their philosophy of preserving good old games, then people should be covered by GoG's service. And if GoG every shut-down for any reason in the future (and I hope that doesn't happen), there would be an announcement of it which could then inform people that they need to download all the offline installers for their games. And the offline installers for all distinct presentations of their games should be available for them to do so at such a time.

Yeah, I'll go work on that. But I got a lot of games so... I'll guess I'll invest some time to write my own downloader.

Why? What is wrong with e.g. gogrepoc.py? I have about the same number of GOG games as you, and I've downloaded all the (English/Windows) offline installers with it.

While I still remember, I guess I need to go copy Street Racer to a separate directory so that I don't accidentally delete it as obsolete, if and when gogrepoc downloads the new (SNES) version. I've done the same with a few other GOG games as well, like keeping the earlier CD/DVD versions of GOG Riven (Myst 2), after the ScummVM version appeared.

But yeah, GOG really should keep the DOS version in the extras, instead of just removing it... Unless it is horribly broken or something.

Indeed. This isn't the first "Bait & Switch" GOG have done either. GOG removed the original .exe's to several DOS games (taking away the option of running DOS games under DOSBox) simply because they also ran under ScummVM. It's understandable not everyone backs up everything due to capacity, but 15MB games like this are fairly small. Much smaller than the typical size of personal data everyone should generally get into the habit of backing up as well ("the cloud" may form one layer of backup, but "the cloud" is not a backup by itself). Unfortunately they don't make previous versions available anymore for offline installers. See the issues with Divinity Original Sin where the newest version has an unfixed bug and yet GOG repeatedly refuse to provide people with an older bug-free version. This is exactly why post-Galaxy GOG is really not a "backup" anymore... That's a lot of if's. If GOG ever shut down, they won't put in any effort for alternative presentations precisely because they'd be shutting down. And if they announced they'd be shutting down in 30 days time, and everyone suddenly tried to re-download everything, I doubt people would even get 20% of their catalogue downloaded due to massively overloading the server. See previous examples of Steam outages on Christmas Day caused by one single game, then multiply by days / weeks due to hundreds / thousands of games. Last minute "panic grabs" are not a wise backup policy at all.

Ah, come on. External hard drives are not very expensive. If you can buy "thousands of games", you can afford it.

This is for the SNES ROM installer. DOS version was ~370MB.

btw how do you know it's the snes rom?

I used to. I can't anymore. gog-repo dryrun reports ~3.5 TB of storage for Windows-only current installers alone (no patches, no extras). Checking dryrun for extras reports another 3+ TB. I absolutely don't have that much storage, let alone meaningfully redundant storage for it to count as a backup. One of the reasons to use GOG (the supposedly consumer friendly gaming store) is that we don't have to worry about bullshit like updates removing things we used to have, or replacing old good soundtracks with new crappy soundtracks (without ability to get to the old version).

And this is when I last ran update a month ago. I've had at lest 50 gigs in new games added since (27 GB of which is Wrath of the Righteous). And then there's the scheduling and drive wear and tear for UPDATES. It gets even bigger than our already-huge if we have to try to keep every update as we go. We should NOT expect things to disappear or be deleted. I have to run -clean on gog-repo just for sanity's sake!

The problems are GOG:
* Not adhering to a strict policy of non-removal.
* Not making proper patches but some games are always entire new fresh installer.
* Numerous things not getting offline installers. (Or not for a while.)
* Not properly structuring their catalog (e.g., many, many gigs of the extras are redundant from different games in catalog having the same extras, like The Witcher 3's different editions... Or games that are bought with a bundle containing the same data. Yes, gog-repo can (and probably should) implement a de-dupe checker, but that's only a small part of the problem.

The offline installer version is 1.0 snes as seen in the first screenshot of the Cannot Download offline installer thread.