GOG created an ocean of updates with this while only a few drops of it are real updates that people actually need and want. This means that they spent a lot of time on thiese imo completely useless updates that they could and should have spent on important things. They are setting wrong priorities here imo. Unfortunately it is not the first time they are doing this.

Edit: I just compared my old Star Wars - Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast with the new one:
Now I can chose prior installation which language I want for the installation. The game will still be installed in English no matter what and I need to switch language in game. So why was it important to change this installer at all? Like I said: mostly useless updates.

So overall this the 4th new gog-installer numbering?

I remember installers had the "1.x.x.x" format.
Then it changed to "gog 2.x.x.x" format.
Then it changed to "gog 2.x.x.x (18416)"
Not it is "gog-1 (18416)"

I remember an official announcement only for the 2nd numbering change.
After that, gog does not bother to inform us about the changes.
We just have to download a lot of GBs to have the exact same games.

I find it disappointing (if not unprofessional) that gog can't decide how to number their game versions.

GOG's filename and version scheme are often inconsistent within one era.

So, are all new installers larger or is Jagged Alliance 2 an exception?

Not all, I looked at three random games in my library and one was same size, one was a mere 4MB larger and one was significantly larger.

Thanks for checking.

Something I did late last night just before going to bed to satisfy my own curiosity.

I wasn't really looking at it that way when I was updating my backup, but thinking back I think that among my 25 updated games there were perhaps 3 or 4 that were smaller (including JA2), and only by a few MB.

I got 23 flags, and going through the posts here, not a single one is about an actual game update. Seriously, GOG? Would a blue-text clarify what all these changes are about, and if there's any point in downloading tons of GB?


From 262.0 MB down to 93.0MB?? Is this correct? If yes, what change led to such a drastic size-drop?



Oddly enough, this is from Aug 2017, and was posted by the devs back then... Did it only now make it into the standalone installers?

Seems like a waste of time working on replacing installers when they clearly don't have the resources to deal with most of the needed fix and updates they have to do.

I also noticed that in some of the games that have different installers for every supported languages the new installer is provided only for the english one. Not particularly thorough to me.

what exactly are they even doing to the installers?

That's exactly why I want a blue-text to clarify what this flood's all about, and why these changes were important enough to each warrant a flag when actual game updates, more so those that come with changelogs, often don't.

I believe they are updating mostly really old installer. As you can see the name convention changes to the new convention. The one I checked have not an optional check for integrity that was missing before. However keep in mind I'm not sure the one I had were up to date due to the infamouse lazyness of GOG in giving us a real way to be notified and check for updates for our backups. The spend money instead developing Galaxy, another waste of money.

Presumably this kind of update is indeed necessary for some things, including a potential galaxy feature. That said, not sure I agree with the priorities, given the issues we have. Either way, i'm glad to know galaxy and it's intrusions onto our systems is not what's being updated.