Dartpaw86: Can someone please tell me. Why is it so important that games be bundled together? I mean, aside from keeping the library more organized, and downloading all the games at once as opposed to wasting time doing each one separately, I still don't see it as a big deal.
I think you hit and then dismissed most of the major reasons:
1. It's a major pain in the ass to back up your collection because un-bundling has resulted in extras getting duplicated (eg. Ultima 1 and Ultima 2 both have the same "Ultima 1 + 2 Manuals" entry in their extras)
2. DOSBox is often bigger than the game itself, which causes the size of older games to balloon up, wasting more bandwidth and backup space.
3. They unbundled things that are only separate because management and/or marketing demanded it. (eg. Heroes Chronicles)
4. Games are sprayed all over an alphabetical sort because GOG didn't impose consistent naming rules (eg. "Tex Murphy ..." and "Tesla Effect, a Tex Murphy Adventure"), nor did they prefix series entries with the series name in the sorting keys.
5. GOG can never get collection organization support right, so we can't fix it ourselves.
6. The "Where did that come from?" effect of seeing things like Crystals of Arborea and Softporn Adventure show up with no hyperlink on the title to clarify that they're, respectively, part of the Ishar and Leisure Suit Larry offerings.
7. The on-website collection views don't scale well and, the more entries they add, the more sluggish and buggy they get.
...and the general impression that it's another example of GOG ignoring existing bugs, hopping on an idea that one or two people wanted because it happened to appeal to GOG employees, breaking a lot of stuff in the process, annoying the hell out of at least as many users as they're appeasing, and unapologetically pretending that nothing is wrong. (See also:
CADT Model)
(And what makes it more annoying is that it speaks of deeper problems in GOG's approach to development because, in any decent website development workflow, they'd be able to fix most of these things in a jiffy and would prioritize them so that the average long-term user satisfaction is as high as possible... that is, fix what users have to deal with now before you spend months underestimating the time it'll take to throw it out and start with "the new hotness". you have to
make us share your enthusiasm, not take it for granted that we will.)
It's especially annoying to me because, despite being one guy renting a room in a basement and programming during what little time I can procrastinate away from coursework, I still tend to do a better job of setting development priorities than GOG does. (See, for example, the
lgogd_uri GUI I just wrote, where my first goal is to make what I already have solid before I start working in new features.)