In the old days , I was really in trust to the quality of GOG builds, but right now I am thinking this situation is pretty much changed.
GOG staff had really nice QA in the past. (Even they could modify some of the game files, cleaning up the obsolete files etc.)
Now many times I asked to the support they are saying we can't touch to the files devs are presented to us.
You know unlike to the Steam devs are not deploying files directly to the gamers. GOG took their files and building an installer package.
But in these days many files like .PDB files clearly packaged with those installers. It has nothing to do with .exe files and clearly those are bogus files. I know it's not easy to deal with those files everytime. But even with the very clear cases nearly no one cares about those files.
In the many cases I am calling it as 2nd class treatment because those devs are generally building their 2nd store builds unwillingly but something for extra cash.
So even they won't care enough about the cleaning up files or something. Some of them even won't send another update even after the release build.
Actually that situation ringing the bells in my head, why GOG staff allowing that ? Here is one of the example :

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/gog-vs-steam.1135373/#post-24988531

Even some of the people are laughed to me. Because %99.9 of them even won't care about GOG. Because they are really happy with their Steam stuff.
This is a bit rough for old installers or old games. They need some quality standards. For example some of those old games files are cleaned up from manuals, weird readme files etc. And those are already provided as extra goodies. But some of them didn't checked enough and bundled with everything.
So in the end I am not only caring about the actual game, I am caring about the game files, build etc. too. Because it needs to be more complex then "hey when I clicked to the shortcut if it's working then there is no problem for me"

So...what's the question then? o_O'

PS: Publishers are the ones to blame here. If you want to have a GOG to buy your games from for a long long time you need to deal with the fact that sometimes they can't do a lot of stuff. They were able to get away with a lot in the past only because they weren't so mainstream (like having the OG Fallouts, directly from Interplay). Now they're under the microscope a lot more than before, so they simply can't risk it.

What? I don't remember there being any issues with GOG selling the originals here as Interplay did possess the rights to sell those games at that time. GOG stopped selling them once the situation changed and later replaced them with the Bethesda editions, so yet again what do you mean by these games being an example of a risky move by GOG in the past?

I never said there was. It was only an example of a "risky" situation that I'm pretty sure wouldn't happen today.

Everyone knew how that David vs. Goliath thing was going to end. And this time David had no slingshot at hand.
Bethesda was going directly for Interplay's throat and there was nothing they could do. Fallout was going to end up in the rich guy's hand. So selling Interplay's games required some serious cojones. Especially that franchise.

GOG needed all the major publishers on board. They had zero chances of success otherwise. And Zenimax/Bethesda is a major player.
So what if Bethesda decided to pull out all their other games "because you're supporting the other team"? You never know how a big company is going to behave in these type of tricky situations.

But GOG stayed with Interplay right through the end. Not only that...but they gave out ALL the games for free in what we all knew was a slap in Bethesda's face (from Interplay ofc, not GOG).

GOG needed Zenimax/Bethesda. But Z/B didn't needed GOG. They were too "insignificant" for them.
But GOG supported the underdog anyway. Even at the risk of losing a major company for it.

Things have changed. GOG is now A HUGE DEAL. Probably the 3rd most succesful online store in the world. And that's only because of the Epic Store. Steam is a freakin' beast so (sadly) there's no comparison there. But what this company has achieved since then is nothing short of spectacular. They have a name now. So "the major players" now need GOG's sales too.

Ironically though...like I've said...that's exactly why IMO they will probably never be that "brave" again. They have a reputation to protect now. Nowadays there's just too much to lose on the table for them to go play rebel.

Hope it helps to clarify my point.

Have a nice day.

Yes, it did, although I am unsure at what point in time would GOG have had the chance to exit graciously from the deal with Interplay as Interplay was one the first to agree on their business model while they certainly had no hope of getting Bethesda/Zenimax onboard at the beginning.

We can't know how the GOG negotiations with Bethesda went over the years, but if GOG had pulled the originals out earlier without a valid reason and soon have had Bethesda's games released, the customers would have connected the dots and more than a few old timers here would not have been pleased at all about GOG currying a favour from the Goljat by kicking the underdog.

Imo you are blowing things way out of proportion. I had a similar issue with Figment. Since I recently got it here on GOG I was able to compare Steam and GOG and guess what: GOGs version was 8GB while the Steam version is only about 1GB. I examined the files and found out that those other files were unneeded. So I contacted the devs via discord to ask them about this. They said that the game was about 8GB at release but they managed to make it smaller. Therefore they updated the game. Unfortunately in this case the game has not been updated correctly so the old files weren't deleted prior updating the game. The devs promised me to fix this and they did - just a few weeks later (I contacted them during the holidays so this short waiting period had to be expected). Now the installer is as big as it should be and everybody is happy: the devs, GOG and myself. Problem solved.

What I want to say is that such mistakes sometimes do happen and it's not that unusual to skip some QA if you have many games to update/support and also have other tasks to do. Question is: how often do you experience such a problem? Can it even considered to be a true problem if it is so easy to fix it in most cases?

I don't want to say that all is good on GOG and I don't want to say that they did not make a mistake. But just take a look at the "What did just update thread" to see how many updates GOG is doing sometimes. They don't want to make mistakes but they make them anyway. Those things happen. Tell them, tell the devs - wait for them to fix it and be done with it. At least that's my opinion.

The real problem is starting on that phase. I was already reporting them over and over again in the years, but especially in the last days GOG support giving same answer and didn't change anything. "We don't have any rights to change files the developers gave us"

So that reach makes a dead end. Also tried to contact with developers directly many times and only few of them responded back or changed something.

Problem here is: devs can put malware into game files and send it to GoG. GoG doesn't check game files so malware can infect all of us. There is no reason to buy games from GoG anymore. I want a safe sterile place, I don't want to check all games by myself I pay for service, convenience.

Nothing can stop GOG from distributing patches and tweaks. In fact they already sorta do, if you contact support or browser the support solutions, they can instruct you to download some file.

There's no reason they couldn't write an automatic installer that installs those files or patches for you..

I am not speaking about patch or tweak files. Those are pretty much debug files and it won't need to be there for release build. GOG doesn't check or won't touch to them.

LMAO What?? You...you just...OMG. *sigh* SMH >_>

Needless files are NOT malware. Maybe bloatware but not malware since those won't harm your PC at all. You said that only a few devs replied to your request. This makes me wonder how often you have experienced the problem at all. The one I mentioned with Figment was the first time I even noticed it. Care to give a few more examples?

Lastly it happened nearly every game I installed again after a while here is a list of it, even I don't know if there is much more or I don't count the fixed ones by my reports;

Kynseed
Mutant Football League
Grim Dawn
My Time At Portia
SteamWorld Heist

Actually I deleted GOG build yesterday but there was same .PDB files in GOG build.