You know guys, while I don't think this is exactly intentional attempt at enforcing Galaxy (Hanlon's razor, again), I don't think anyone should persist in dissmissing the very question as "tin foil hat" after what we saw here recently. GOG worked hard to make such doubts legitimate.

And while I don't think this may not be a "conspiracy" to enforce Galaxy, it obviously is part of GOG's policy of prioritising Galaxy over everything else and relegating non-Galaxy users to second-class status.

Yes, and that is not going to change now. We know now that GOG has, not will, changed to become a storefront primarily aimed at marketing new games, primarily games that are popular at the moment (indie titles mostly). To this end, due to the nature of this type of gaming a client is necessary - as the games are not finished (hence the constant patching), require online only features (multiplayer, social media interactions and such like - GoblinsInc is an example), and have endless ad-on packs. This is the new age of gaming and that is what they want to market, forget old games, drm free all that, that time is passing.
This isn't something that happened recently, it started happening years ago with the InDev, Galaxy, Connect etc. features, and just looking at the releases. We may get a few games over the coming months, but I find it unlikely to see anything other than the kind of stuff you find on the android store, or greenlight, or even in humble bundles.

Keep rolling that tin foil. Anyway, yell at devs for not patching their games on GOG.

They patch games on Galaxy.

They don't patch the stand-alone installers in a consistent or timely fashion.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be able to read the boxscore, here.

Right? Totally crazy! How could anyone not implicitly trust GOG about Galaxy?

Except of course that it clashes quite a bit with the excuse for why offline patches take so long to arrive.

Customers: Why are we getting patches slower than everyone else?

GOG: That's because here at GOG we take pride in the quality of our products. That's why we won't release a patch for a game without first having our own people test it intensively on a number of different hardware configurations.

Customers: But aren't you allowing developers to push any updates they want directly to the end users through Galaxy?

GOG: Uhm, well, what I meant was...

Customers: Yes...?

GOG: [runs away]

Apart from that, given that Galaxy patches do arrive in a significantly more timely fashion, it really ought to be trivial to write an automated process which packs the same changed files into an offline installer. If GOG are manually constructing offline installers at this point (their catalog is close to 2000 titles, and they've been in business since 2008), then they really are incompetent, either on a technical level (if they can't figure out how to do it) or as decision-makers (if they don't think it's important).

Additionally, even when a game is eventually updated, these days there usually isn't a patch, just an updated installer, meaning that for a large game you may have to download 10+ GB in order to fix a few spelling errors here and there in the game.

I do find the new web UI annoying as far as updates go and I refuse to install Galaxy, but GoG still offers a DRM free copy of a title that I own and not borrow. You may call it extreme, but I refuse to buy from any online DRM service and GoG is still the best option afik. My only beef is when devs release a game with a Galaxy only multiplayer option, but I have noticed if the user base screams enough, a LAN option magically appears. (8-bit Armies being an example)

Because of the Lizardmen.

*looking around and hoping they don't hear me*

So without galaxy no patches and no notifications. Whats next?

The question is, how long has it been since the update was pushed to Galaxy?

That's not an excuse. Faster loathing is a reason to use Galaxy,. Their excuse was that people were to stupid to install it themselves, and therefore they need to pack it with every single download.
Quality and speed tend to be opposing forces.... but OP here only asked about speed, not quality, so....

Special delivery coming up!

Except it doesn't because they mentioned that Galaxy you get updates earlier but you have the risk of having said update breaking more things that they correct. That's one of the reason why they advertised the "rollback" feature on Galaxy so that even if devs push buggy patches it's possible to rollback to a previous version.

^This.


^ And this.


^ And this.


^ And this.


^ And this.



Except that they're the same, unpatched standalone installers you can download directly from your account.



A week.

Nah, they're just trying to not patch games by enforcing Galaxy.