GamezRanker: if the game installer is very small[<5 GB or so]

nightcraw1er.488: A 100gb is not out of the ordinary over 2-4 games nowadays.

nightcraw1er.488: Sure older games do not benefit, in fact anything less than a couple of gig is not worth the effort. But seriously mate, take a break, go outside and have a beer in the garden or something.

dtgreene: 5GB is "very small"? I don't think so, as the game I'm playing right now, which is part of a compilation of 2 games, has a 2.4GB installer.

MadeUpName556: This is a direct quote from Fitgirl, an expert in data compression.

"Why GOG Offline Installers Suck"

"GOG is a great company, with some problems here and there, but they try to follow the DRM-free path they have chosen. But there is one little fucking problem, which makes me fucking mad.

GOG, your offline installers SUCK. And your engineer(s), who’s responsible for them should be fired, then hanged, then burnt (order can be changed).

So, why do they suck you may ask? Around 2-3 years ago GOG switched from old installers, which have been using RAR archives as containers to a new scheme. And it’s fucking abysmal. Lemme tell you how it works.

So, while preparing data for their installers, GOG do the following:

Every game game file is splitted to a relatively small chunks of data
Every chunk is compressed with ZLIB algo (the same which used in generic ZIP archives)
Every chunk’s name is hashed/randomized and then put into INNO Setup container with another ZLIB compression over. This stage alone is crazy – you can’t compress compressed data, only make it larger.
INNO container is splitted to relatively large BIN files of ~ DVD size.

So if you think it wasn’t crazy enough (compared to RAR compression), hear how their installers behave on your PC.

Each chunk is copied to your user temp folder (usually it’s located on a system drive, which now is often and SSD with a limited lifetime and size)
Every chunk is unpacked and then concatenated into a single original file
AFTER that this new file is copied to the destination folder from that temporary folder

So, if your system drive is small, you won’t be able to install a GOG game. You will see “not enough free space” only because fucking idiots in GOG don’t know how to make modern installers which don’t use temp folders and can decompress data directly from source to destination. Every pirated scene setup is better than GOG. They all use FreeArc-created archives with very fast yet relatively good compression, which installs faster than you HDD can process. NOT the case of GOG installers, which can be as slow as fuck. Can you imagine, that even their old RAR installers were much faster and smaller due to usage of solid compression option and direct decompression?

If you’re a victim of their installers, there is a fucked-up “workaround” for that. But seriously, changing Windows variables or using junction points to another drive only because GOG engineers get they salary for nothing? Sheesh."

Lifthrasil: My guess is, that the offline installers are by now supposed to be inconvenient. GOG still provides them, because they still have to to not lose too much face, but they really, really want you to use Galaxy. So the offline installer problem may originally have been caused by incompetence. But GOG won't fix the problem, because it is convenient for them that installation via Galaxy works better than via offline installers.

Shmacky-McNuts: Off line installers dont suck. 100% of my games are fine the way they are offline, in a machine I don't worry about getting damaged by internet A-holes.

_Auster_: The first comment explains why they do.

tl;dr: they're not optimized so they take more space than they should and they write far more than they would if they were just compressed files, which lowers the life spam of your HDDs/SSDs.

timppu: Your swap file, Windows (or Linux) log files and your web browser's cached data will wear down your SSD much faster than a GOG offline installer writing twice to your SSD when you install a game.

MadeUpName556: So, while preparing data for their installers, GOG do the following:

Every game game file is splitted to a relatively small chunks of data
Every chunk is compressed with ZLIB algo (the same which used in generic ZIP archives)
Every chunk’s name is hashed/randomized and then put into INNO Setup container with another ZLIB compression over. This stage alone is crazy – you can’t compress compressed data, only make it larger.
INNO container is splitted to relatively large BIN files of ~ DVD size.

_Auster_: Not sure what one thing has to do with the other. The counter-examples you gave are everyday events, no? And these things add up, so then you'll have swap files, logs, cache AND gog's installers wearing down your disk.

rtcvb32: Hmmm... that certainly does sound like an annoyance and confusing and useless.

timppu: It is not useless if it streamlines and makes it easier/faster to create offline installers from the existing Galaxy files, with automation.

Ghost Robertson: I dunno about the whole "wear and tear thing"...

SSD's have TBW that usually implies their lifespan, When in task manager doing "nothing" i watch the SSD using less than 1MB reading and writing, Funny though my other SSD that i have games installed on doesn't, probably because the OS and such isn't on it.

Anyway, My SSD's are about 300 TBW (Terabytes written) So imo, Uninstalling and reinstalling games all the time is just wear on your discs and other from that i don't see the hard drives with such a life span dying so quick... unless you copy 1TB back and forth 300 times for fun... 0_o

timppu: Those logs, web caches and swap files write data to your SSD much more often (sometimes constantly). Not so many gigabytes at a time I guess, but it adds up fast.