GOG were hiring programmers with networking experience. So hopefully they know what they are doing.

An ideal updating system should require minimal intervention from my side. A ideal system for downloading and installing games should allow me to merge those two activities, again to require as little intervention from my side as possible. If other people prefer to do things manually allow them to do that. GOG should upload files like they do now including patches that people can manually apply.

But they should also have a downloader/client that will come with an integrated library function(so you don't have to use a browser to find the games you have installed) and will install games for you as well as download them if you so desire.

This client/downloader should then have a system for installing patches that gives you a dialog asking if you want to install a particular patch with change notes included. Such a dialog box should give the user the ability to say yes to installing the patch, say no to installing the patch as well saying yes to all patches and no to all patches. Ideally you would also have a system to revert your installed game to an older version. This dialog was what the "client" Game Xstream/Triton was using. I fondly remember getting having such a dialog box pop up when Prey was patched. I am not quite sure if it had the "yes to all" and "no to all" options, I think not, but a GOG client should absolutely have those options. Ideally you should also be able to revert back to any version you would desire.

IMHO there doesn't need to be much of a difference at all between a "client" and just adding features to the existing downloader. I have seen no complaints that GOG has a downloader yet magically if you call a piece of software a "client" it become evil. Even if it is a 100% optional piece of software.

I value my time there is really no reason I should HAVE to spent it on managing a 450+ game library when I could spent that same time actually playing those games.

GOG should do what they originally did, get Good Old Games and stay away from new ones, especially today since most are made in a haste. Companies value more quantity rather than quality.

Beside, by waiting a couple of years to see if the new games will be (or not) a good game, you save money on the rights. Don't put a game on GOG just because it's pretty and hyped, most games today are always over-hyped. Not enough time has passed between Witcher 2 and 3 to make the third of the series as good as the others. It will be probably be filled with bugs, missing features or other issues that should have been addressed before releasing the game like all games since the 2000s (except maybe a few games... no more than you have fingers on one hand though). I am not saying that the Witcher is a bad game, but that stupid trend of game designers and publishers to release in quantity rather in quality is ruining the games themselves. At least 80% of the games released on the market are not even worth mentioning, of that last 20%, 80% of it is not worth buying, and of what's left, only a few are really great games (Crusader Kings 2 for example).

All this to say that I don't want GOG.com to become another Steam. I love my GOG just the way it is, where I can get GOOD OLD GAMES. Leave the new ones to Steam and keep looking for underdogs and excellent games from the pass. Let them be stuck with pieces of junk. Beside, by becoming like another Steam, you just go in competition with them, if you stick to your winning recipe, you should have much less competition except from others who might want to do like GOG.

I agree on that one. It should become better than Steam, but it still has to compete. It can't stay away from it. I don't want GOG to be only for old games, because there is no other DRM-free distributor. Let GOG sell old and new. But I agree on GOOD ones. And it looks like GOG intends to stay different and to prefilter games for you in order to keep the quality bar high.
See http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-15-gog-on-early-access-definitely-not-every-game-should-be-permitted

I think it's enough. 3-4 years is long time for game development.

Web development is an utter mess of standards, exceptions, quasi-standards and standards that haven't yet been fully worked out on but everyone has already started using them. Developing an application is much cleaner by comparison. The worst you'll have to do is have several different APIs (like Windows and Unix) which you need to write a common wrapper API for.

EDIT: a great example is the Transmission BitTorrent client, it runs natively with Cocoa (OS X), GTK+ or Qt (Linux & Windows), in a web browser and even as a command-line application. The developers wrote the core of the program as a library in C (libtransmission) and then the front-ends hook up to it to give the user a nice interface.

Some web development is hard. But getting HTTPS to work isn't, unless your design is terrible. Worse yet, it *was* working better than it is now. Multiple bug reports over months and 1) No Responses + 2) Still Broken.

Developing a client isn't any easier then web development overall. A simple client is easier than a complex website and vice versa. Something that does autoupdates or actively manages files and data isn't simple. GOG barely managed a downloader for Windows. A whole client, much less cross-platform? Hah.

I have ways to mitigate a broken website - plugins, alternate links, etc. I can use Google to search GOG instead of the hilariously broken GOG search. It's annoying and I shouldn't have to, but I can deal with that since GOG obviously can't fix it. I have fewer tools to easily mitigate a program that causes issues in my PC. It's a higher stakes game and GOG has already proven their developers and management can't handle the simple, not-sensitive tasks.

TL;DR GOG devs have failed flagrantly and repeatedly enough that I don't trust homegrown GOG tools.

Desurium (already mentioned above in the thread): https://github.com/lodle/Desurium

I'd definitely not trust any client for managing installations which is not open source.

^ So much this!


And buggy as hell! ;-P

I've never used Desurium, but I've never had any problems with Desura other than it not validating something that was already installed and needing to redownload it.

If they use somebody else's code, there will be less code for them to write. Also, the Pope is Catholic, bears go in the woods, and the sun rises and sets every day. More seriously, there are serious problems with using other people's code, even if it is open-source. And I wouldn't hold Desura up as paragon of reliability.

It would have been easy for GOG to use standard forum software. But they didn't. The downloader is also homegrown. I'm not expecting that trend to change.

The Pope is Jesuit. In a religion of rectangles, he's a square. Sure, they're all rectangles; but he's more so. =)

I tried it out of curiosity, it didn't survive 24hrs on my machine - it's a buggy piece of software that takes for ever to log you in, crashes constantly and does not respond to the options "restart/ force update" it gives you after it crashes.

What I'd like more info on is about the part I highlighted in your reply. Could you please elaborate on what and how Desura "validates" an installed game and give an example?

Desurium is rather rough, but it shows that it's possible as an open source project. And it was audited security wise. New Desura might rewrite it in the future.

GOG creating their own client without opening it up would make it worse than Desurium even if it won't be buggy.

I think he means validating the integrity of files? Checksums and the like?