This question is directed to the GOG staff.

I remember way back when, playing an online music game called O2Jam NX. In addition to in-game downloads of new songs via their servers, they also had the option to download everything all at once via BitTorrent.

Has adopting this approach for larger installers occurred to you guys? It would probably save you a ton on bandwidth costs.

Here comes the anti piracy police...

Anyway, it would be great to have such a way to download stuff. Restrict connection to the download server by IP address and account, and you'll be done with the possible piracy.

There are such things as private trackers. I'm a member of a couple sites that use them. Link the tracker to the GOG forums/account, and you're good.

BitTorrent has such a stain on its name due to its strong association with software piracy that GOG likely avoids it for the sake of the publishers they are trying to negotiate with; the last thing they need is one of the more ignorant publishers to hear "BitTorrent" and immediately think "piracy" then decline to join GOG. It sucks, since using BitTorrent would be a great way to spread GOG's bandwidth load and speed up downloads for practically everyone.

It wouldn't be so bad if the word "torrent" didn't have such a terrible association with piracy. The minute you mention "torrent", never mind that it would be preceded by "legal", their brain shuts down and they scream "PIRATE!" at you.

Blizzard's downloader uses BitTorrent so I don't think it's all about piracy reasons. Anyway I just don't prefer that because unless you have a lot of seeders it will be much slower. Plus I think there's a lot of people out there with very limited bandwidth who wouldn't want to spend much of it on uploading.

Call it decentralised means of distribution via peer to peer networking and write a neat little addition to the optional GoG downloader. You'd be both set with legal restrictions on who's allowed to download which game and with avoiding the name 'torrent' ;) As long as it's an optional way of getting the game (much like you can use the downloader right now, or the browser, or both, whatever floats your boat) I don't see any negative results from the 'customer' point of view. You could even award the people who provide a bit of upstream with a free game code after X TB positive traffic ;)

They can call it whatever they want, but the publishers are still going to want to know details of how their content is being distributed. Eventually that is going to lead to a reveal of the actual underlying infrastructure of their "decentralised means of distribution via peer to peer networking" as simply BitTorrent.

Actually, it is not that rare.... it's becoming quite a common choice for modern MMO installers, given that a big client size+big number of users can be quite costly to distribute entirely with a traditional file hosting.
I don't think that the publisher are that dumb to automatically mistake 'torrent' with 'free-for-all', and if they really are, that means you can play a "It's just like WoW installer" card and make them happy :-)

I agree that this should be optional, and here on GoG is probably not worth the effort to setup properly, since, so far, the catalog file size is not a big issue.

BitTorrent is fine for cooperative distribution of FOSS. That is a legitimate use, but it is the only one. It is a lousy means of distribution when you have a well-managed IT operation and can afford adequate servers, bandwidth, and forward sites, because its performance is unpredictable and it depends on end users contributing expensive uplink bandwidth.

I have 400 KB/s downlink and 40 KB/s uplink. The hell I'm contributing that 40KB/s uplink pipe for the distribution of commercial software when the vendor damn well can pay for enough server capacity and bandwidth that I can download from their servers alone.

And the reason the ISPs and telcos and cable companies are so persistent about trying to regulate traffic is not because they want to regulate content but because they are sick of having to put up with BitTorrent clogging their uplinks.

Yeah, I hate torrents. If you had to manage a network carrying torrent traffic, you would too.

Block p2p.
Use Software Restriction Policies.

GOG would be immensely unpopular if they made it the only download option (they'd lose my business - my university disallows bittorrent on its network). So if they offer it as an alternative, how many people would really choose to use it? Given that the current CDN is speedy and works well. I doubt it would be worth the support costs.

This is actually one of the reasons I wouldn't want GOG to use BitTorrent. Many ISPs, including my own, intentionally block or throttle "undesirable" traffic like BitTorrent, making it virtually useless.

Works for private networks. Doesn't work if you're a common carrier. Try it if you're an ISP, and the supposed defenders of Internet freedom (read, pirates and freeloaders) will hale you into court for trying to monopolize content.
Indeed. Using torrents as a primary means of distribution cuts off some substantial percentage of customers, and it alienates at least some others.