I have been Steam user for over 5 years and most of the time download speed is between 1MB/s to 1.4MB/s ...on rare occasion it drops to 500KB/s. With GOG downloads I get max 1.2MB/s but mostly around 300KB/s to 600KB/s and as low as 50KB/s...Considering how many people use Steam, 10-12 Million every day, GOG has no excuse to keep them so low!
I live in Australia and have Cable internet!
So, why is this so?
I am no big fan of Steam (as I keep criticising them on their own forum) but I get better service there than here at GOG! If GOG wants people to keep buying their games, the service has to improve. Whatever is causing the bottleneck at their servers, should be fixed for the sake of matching the download service that Steam offers. I have around 150 games at GOG and 600 at Steam so I am telling this from personal experience.

I remember downloading things from GOG with up to 6MB/s, but since July this year the download speeds have dropped considerably.

Not sure if it's because of all the extra traffic or some Galaxy-related restriction, but you should really work on improving the download speeds guys. The installer size, especially for newer games, is not at all that negligible. Can't say I fully agree with this. Download speeds should improve regardless of what Steam is capable of offering. It's all about being able to download 8GB installers in a decent amount of time with a good internet connection.

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Hmm, can't say I have any problems with the download speeds from GOG. Although I'm on the European continent as well. My download speed is around the 4 to 5 Mb/s. I think that's also about the maximum of my connection.

Maybe this is specific to Australian GOG users??? Can other Aussies tell me their experience please...

Don't think so, though there could be some underlying influence. From what I've see the transfer rates fluctuate every day, so it all depends on *when* you download, which tends to be governed by what timezone you're in.

I've had 2-3MB/s on some occasions, but overall it's much worse than before (when I too always had download rates close to my connection limit).

How do you download them?

With the GOG downloader, when I'm at my flat I get quite reliably my full 2Mb/s, but the direct links give me around 500Kb/s. Didn't check the speed with Galaxy.

About a month ago I downloaded lots of my GOG games using the direct web links (as well as gogrepo.py). With the direct links I noticed an odd phenomenon that sometimes the game would come as fast as I could download (e.g. up to 6 Mbytes/sec), but quite often it seemed to be throttled to around 400kbytes/sec or so I think (per file), from start to finish of the download. This could happen even with the same file/game, trying to download it twice.

I didn't recognize any pattern there, sometimes I got a game at full speed, sometimes throttled. Sometimes it even made sense to cancel a huge download which was coming at 400kB/s and then restart it sometime later, it might come at full speed then. Then again since I was downloading lots of games, I just started several concurrent downloads, each running at 400 kbytes/sec. It still added up quite nicely with seven or so concurrent downloads (7x400 kbytes/sec). Plus, as said, some of these concurrent downloads would possibly be downloading on the fast lane anyway...

I have no idea how the Galaxy downloads are though, if that is what the OP was talking about. Anyway now I have almost all my 1024 GOG games (Windows/English) and extras downloaded to an external 2TB hard drive, just need to keep them up to date time to time with gogrepo.py. :)

The problem must be on your end. I usually get 12-17.5 MB/s from the GOG servers.

Yupp. My normal speed is 6.3MB/s, but now it's anything between 3 and 5.5 (which is still more than enough, but...). Funny thing: This started shortly after GOG's "Help us to improve downloads" test xP Next time I won't help GOG "improving" stuff that works perfect ;P

I still get my normal 2 MB/s (using the GOG Downloader or DownThemAll)..

I use the GOG Downloader as well btw. :)

I still have my usual Download speed of 2-3 MB/s

Yes, I've noticed this too, though in my case the full speed downloads are rather rare. I do get one every now and then, that much is true.

Yea, I complained about this also, but it seems not everyone has this issue. The Gog Downloader seems to be a bit better, but downloading over the website is a huge pain. And I have even on bad days about 80Mbs download speed... except with GOG...

Don't know why but gog has the download speed for my area limited to 2MB/s which is comparing to other internet stores very slow. When the download of a game starts it goes with around 7MB/s and then it drops to 2MB/s in a couple of seconds. Note that I have minimum 80Mb/s (cca. 9.8 MB/s) download speed on cable network (goes up to 120Mb/s on a good day - cca. 14.5MB/s).