I'm not buying any of the lame excuses for why GOG files are in chunks.

At the very least, chunks should be an option, as opposed to the current system of them being forced on everyone, whilst giving the customer no choice to have a single .exe file instead.

8.5GB, actually. And Blu-Ray starts at 23GB (Blu-Ray is worse for pre-recorded media due to as-yet-uncracked DRM, but for data storage it's fine). BD drives are available in a variety of form factors, and support DVD media as well, so there's little reason (other than maybe cost) not to replace your old DVD drive with one.

I specifically did not mention exFAT because it is supported even less widely than NTFS (for example, I've never seen a Linksys router that supports exFAT, but most support NTFS), and really offers no advantage over NTFS that I can tell (and yes, that includes the supposed flash rewrite frequency issues, which exFAT suffers from just as much, and is generally alleviated by internal wear leveling) Granted, I try my best to avoid both, so maybe my lack of experience is biasing me here. I wish the Linux-based devices would actually support Linux filesystems for USB drives (at least the most common and stable, such as ext4).

We Neanderthals don´t know what you are talking about. My DVD reader/writer works great. A bit noisy though. And I yet have lots of virgin DVD´s around. Althought not for much longer if I try to use them to backup the behemoths mentioned earlier.

Oh, I learn something new, thank you.

No, you have not seen any complaints about that, never mind "a lot".

As for DVDs, if you absolutely insist on using them, DVD burning apps will break up large files into parts as necessary. That's not a valid reason for having 4GB chunks.

I like it. If my connection is capped I can download it in parts instead of burning my entire limit for the month on an entire game.

Oblivion wasn't too bad. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has 10 parts for the base game, and 4 more for the DLC.

Why is this such an issue?

FAT16 can theoretically handle 16GB depending on sector size support. (2Gb with 32k sectors)

Fat32 is widely used and overall very balanced in space vs overhead. Beyond the name Fat32 uses 28bit sector allocation. It doesn't include a bunch of newer features that aren't really needed for general storage, like who owns the file(s) or if it is encrypted, or OS specific additions they may do. Simpler can be better. And as long as you don't NEED >4Gb files, it can handle 2TB drives (512byte sector size, making it very efficient for small files).

Recently looking i found the 'split' utility that lets me break a stream or file set to smaller files (for doing large transfers between computers in smaller chunks). Also 7zip will split according to size too so you can archive within the limits of the filesystem.

ExFat I've had crash my computer before, but this was using imdisk and on a different machine (so maybe other bugs in the past), i haven't had much issues recently, even doing a 26Gb ramdrive.

Wikipedia Fat32

As opposed to a single EXE at 180Gb? Assuming it had an error somewhere, redownloading the 180Gb file would be annoying vs identifying 1-2 files and downloading just those... Not to mention, what if you want to burn them on DVD or Blueray discs for backup? You'll have to first split it, then combine it on your computer later before you could install it making it take 3x the space vs just installing from the drive directly in smaller chunks...

And in the past you could split zip files, or use rar or 7z to split it up. For compatibility reasons i'd find it best NOT to use proprietary apps to do such a thing. Though a number of filesystems for ISO limit to 2Gb files i think, which is one reason you see DVD movie VOB files in multiple chunks.

I personally find the chunks more useful for transporting files around than one giant wad of data, so I'm fine with it as it is, but I can understand wanting the choice. However GOG's updater has left us with games that have been regressively patched to older versions through bugs in the system. Do you really think GOG is competent enough to rework offline installers to safely offer up both split and joined archives?

Because it would be much easier to download a game then go off and do something for a while (like go the gym) then when you return you game is ready, but instead we have to keep checking it which is why I said it's annoying. I have better things to do than keep checking my downloads.

2077 used to have 29 parts, a couple of patches ago. Down to 28, now.

Use galaxy or gogrepo then. They are there for “convinience”. I hear that donwthemall or me of those plugins can do it as well. I never seem to come across this issue, simply download the few files when I buy things and store them offline.

I think it still depends on how the download server works. At least I've had numerous cases where e.g. Firefox hasn't been able to resume the download (that was interrupted for an unknown reason), and if you exit the download "screen", Firefox will automatically delete the partial fire.

There was a rather complicated workaround for that (at least on that particular download site; not sure if it'd work in e.g. GOG):
1. Do not exit the FF download screen (so that you still have the partial file).
2. With File Explorer, copy the partial file somewhere else.
3. Exit the download screen, and restart the whole download. This will recreate that partial file.
4. Pause that download manually, copy the original (bigger) partial file over the new one, and resume the download. exFAT is supposed to be the solution, FAT without e.g. the 4GB restriction, and still more lightweight than NTFS, without features that are probably not needed on USB drives and such, like file ownerships, group policies or whatever there is in NTFS. I've seen that behavior myself at least in Windows 7 (with Microsoft's own antivirus), with those GOG game installers where the .exe is big, like several hundred megabytes. There has been a long pause when you run the installer, before anything happens. I think others have reported it as well.

With those divided games where the first .exe file is small, no such problem (ie. the pause is very short).

I can't tell for sure now if that behavior still exists in Windows 10 and 11... I could test it, I guess.

Chunks are far better for multiple reasons.

Not having to download a single humongous file is the obvious one. From a reliability perspective, multiple smaller files will be easier to download for those with a poor connection.

A 20GB exe file is also just a stupid thing to make. There's no reason for an executable to be that big and it makes far more sense to have resource archives that the installer unpacks.

There are also the reasons others have mentioned, including the 4GB file size limit in FAT32 and the fact that DVDs are 4(.7)GB.
Yeah, I've found that "controlled" downloads, i.e. downloads you've paid for often use things like dynamic links to stop you sharing them and they often don't play nicely with download managers.