Gog's countdown timer has no man's sky being available for download on Aug 12th, 2016,

but at noon-12 PST...? Why does everyone else get it at midnight?

I don't think the timer is very clear. They should have done it purely in hours. By "2 days" do they mean midnight to midnight or 48 hours from the current time?

My countdown timer shows days and hours, so by that I am counting two days as 48 hours.
The countdown timer for me should reach zero by 19:00 on Friday. So if that's the case that really disappointingly late.

I found a countdown timer, this should reach zero 20:00 on Friday, but cannot post link. (GOG forbidden for me) :(

EDIT:

If you check your account -> libary -> No Man's Sky, there is a timer :
This game will be available for full download on Aug 12, 2016 only 46 : 29 : 08 left

Looks like they switched it over to just hours. So now it says it will release at 11:00 a.m. on friday

(Jack Bauer voice) It's counting down. WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME! ( end Jack Bauer voice ).

my countdown timer equates to a 10AM PST release. Perhaps GOG is staggering the release times to lessen the load on their servers?

I love GOG - truly I do, I got Witcher 3 on here exclusively because of how much I love and support these guys.

Although I love them, I 100% cannot stand by this ridiculousness - and am now thinking of removing my pre-order from this platform and buying it either on the PS4 (though I loathe to do that) or from a physical store. How can a digital distributor not offer a pre-download at the very least to mitigate the "stagger".

Why should I wait more than half a day to install digital content when a store such as Target would have it at midnight on Thursday? Wasn't the whole purpose of making a platform like this to cut out the middle man and make it easier for consumers to get their products from developers?

Guess I am missing something.

Either way, I wish GOG the best and now I must take the time and deliberate whether or not I want to cancel my pre-order on this platform. *Sigh*

TL;DR - Disappointed in a digital distributors decision to stagger a digital release so that we are all stuck waiting to get a game half a day late.

Edit/Caveat - Unless of course it has to do with standard release dates for the whole "Worldwide Release", if so, then disregard and change my TL;DR to "They need to be A LOT more clear on why the release time is as it is - especially when people are concerned and being semi-vocal about it."

I have pre-ordered on GOG and the timer is the same on GOG as it is on Steam when i check it out.

I believe it was 6pm GMT on the 12th, which is 4am saturday morning for me.

My time equates to 12pm Central Time (which would be 10 am Pacific Time), so that seems to indicate it releases at the same moment across the world, not at a specific local time.

e.g. 12pm local time release, means people in Central Time get it 2 hours before people in Pacific Time; this is not the actual case, from my understanding.

Countdown timer on the front page for me will end at 3am Saturday 13th (GMT +10).

That's what, 5pm GMT on Friday 12th?

Ridiculousness? GoG are under no obligation to supply purchased content to you, one second before it's available. To demand the content earlier makes you sound very entitled. Though I shouldn't be surprised, it seems to be the norm these days.

Furthermore, this is not Steam, where the platform is in itself DRM. Galaxy is just a glorified download manager, any games downloaded through it can be run without Galaxy being open. There is likely no framework in place to secure a game that has been preloaded.

Lastly and the simplest answer really, did it ever occur to you, that GoG hasn't got preload available, because they're not allowed? I've heard rumours that there isn't a preload available for Steam either (something you may want to investigate).

Correct. So it releases 6pm British Summer Time (GMT+1).

Easy. Don't include the executable in the preload download, and release the exe at launch as a small patch. That's what they did for the Witcher 3, if I remember correctly.

There are two possibilities. They are unable to offer a preload (as you said), or they are unwilling to offer a preload.
Witcher 3 was ~25GB, No Man's Sky is supposedly around 6GB (On a stream I watched, the PSN download was 4.2GB). It was probably seen as not worth the effort to offer a preload.

Well that's lame. According to the countdown timer I'll be 5 hours into the 13th before this launches. If you say it launches on the 12th time it to at least meet or exceed that schedule for everyone!