NostalgicGamer: If you're in NZ, then 5am would be about right as it is supposed to be 2-3am on Saturday morning (13th) in the eastern states of Australia. I can only imagine what with no pre-load and with the amount of people wanting to download the game at the same time once released, coupled with how slow and shit Australia's broadband is just how long it will take to download 6Gb.

A pre-load option would be nice with the executable patched in at the time of simultaneous world-wide release.

jedi5002: Correct. So it releases 6pm British Summer Time (GMT+1).

jedi5002: 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.

Xaujin: How can a digital distributor not offer a pre-download

Xaujin: 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."

ShakyrNvar: 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).