I don't know if Galaxy is any better but using the standalone version of Cyberpunk, and it takes hours for me to download it (not your fault), about an hour to verify it (because who knows after downloading something for days), and about an hour to install it.

You'd think that it is using some crazy compression, but nope.

The sum of all the install files: 103GB

The sum of all the files after install: 59.6GB

That's right... the installer is bigger than the final product.

I used the innoextract tool to investigate. There were 47.2GB worth of non-English language files not installed.

With this amount of bloat, surely it would have been smarter to make installers for each language.

And still 59.6GB+47.2GB=106.8GB, so all this long compression times just to save 3GB. You would save space just by splitting the installers by language. Save GOG some bandwidth costs as well.

I can only deduce that the .archive files in Cyberpunk are already heavily compressed, at least by the standards of whatever compression algorithm the GOG installer is using, it can barely compress anything out of it if anything at all (maybe the compression gains were from the non .archive files)

Specific to Cyberpunk, I also note that it is a bit strange for a Game to be using compressed files in the final product, especially ones so heavily compressed, because this adds overhead to the game performance as the computer (or console) has to spend CPU time in decompressing the files rather than putting that CPU time towards running the game itself. Maybe the Cyberpunk Developers could get more performance by not using such strong compression on the Game Files.

But that's not all, looking at the Task Manager while it is verifying or installing, it is single threaded. I have a CPU with 12 Threads so I got 11 Threads here doing nothing. It should be 12X faster than it is if it were using a modern compression algorithm.

These GOG installers are straight out of the 00s and just don't scale with modern games which are dozens of Gigabytes big.

It doesn't help in this case that whoever packaged Cyberpunk in particular didn't pay much attention to what they were doing to realise that the compression gains were negligible and should have turned off the compression if possible, let alone including all the language files in the main installer when each one is about 4.5-5GB (and there are 11 of them).

To be clear, the once the game is installed, the other 10 languages are not even copied over at all, the the game runs perfectly fine without them.

With all this extra time downloading unnecessary language files, verification of that big download (optional), and installing it (where the installer is decompressing everything on a single thread, on files which are practically already fully compressed in the first place and will stay fully compressed) this all adds up to a huge waste of time of many hours multiplied by however many thousands of people used the GOG standalone installer, and who waited for the Cyberpunk download to complete with all these extra unnecessary files (languages they don't need). I wonder what that would add up to, it would be quite a lot.

If nothing changes, it is just going to happen again the next time there is a big game.

I kindly suggest updating the GOG installers to utilise lzma (7-zip/.7z) format for compression, with multiple threads, which actually a very easy task to do given the amount of resources available for that. And please ask the person packaging them up to kindly pay close attention to 1. The overall download size where possible to exclude files and 2. Not to use strenuous compression techniques on files which can hardly be compressed any further.

Thank you very much.

I noticed and agree with this!

Yeah, and GOG's MojoSetup is still from 2010. What features might Icculus have added in the INTERVENING DECADE?

Don't know, but GTK3 and Wayland would be a heck of a looker compared to these nearly moribund GTK2 widgets.

I have done some more research and want to add the following:

1. Cyberpunk's internal compression seems ok, it is using Oodle which is a generally accepted way of doing it because it has good decompression performance and even the PS5 supports the algorithms natively in hardware to give it that much more of a boost.

2. Even the Pirates hate GOG Installers and are repacking them. Unbelievable that the Pirates are getting a better experience than paid users even on a DRM-free game!

There's a trade-off here; the more compressed files take less space on disk, therefore less disk I/O is needed to load them, which can result in better load times on some systems (particularly those with slower disks and faster CPUs).

(With that said, the disk space requirements are absurd. If I were to install it on my shiny new laptop, it would take up more than half the storage space just for the game and the installer. On my smaller laptop, forget it; the installer won't even fit on the disk if I removed everything else (including the OS!).)

It seems that developers have forgotten how to do more with limited space; why do games need to have size measured in gigabytes, let alone tens of gigabytes? At least they're not 16-bit installers, which won't run natively on 64-bit Windows. (If you run into that situation, try otvdm or winevdm.)

Wow, such a waste. Plus the old installer..
I agree with the OP, but knowing GOG, they'll never change anything :\

This is such an interesting subject, yet there's no reply or comment from any devs?

Your dark ritual of necromancy has attracted a wondering cleric.

The cleric approaches and says: "You're not new around here! The ancient order of dev knights has been all but wiped out of existence many centuries ago. Very few remain. None tread these parts."

Because of having a large amount of textures at acceptable quality, plus audio, not to mention models and animations to a lesser extent. This is necessary if you want to have a game with a lot of content look and sound like Cyberpunk. It's already compressed about as much as it could be. Nothing at all to do with developers "forgetting how to do more with limited space". Quite a lot of engineering time over the years has been spent on compression techniques and hardware support for them. If you want to reduce the size to any real extent, your only choice is to either remove content or degrade the quality significantly.

"Acceptable" quality doesn't need that much space, and I have a feeling that the ultra high quality assets that some games use aren't worth the space for most players. In particular, degrading the quality significantly will not reduce it below acceptable levels.

It does, though. We're well into the age of 4K resolution being common/standard. You can't get away with producing TV shows for 1080p anymore either. It objectively does. Theoretically games could be distributed with smaller assets for people with old/bad hardware, but that becomes logistically annoying very quickly and generally not worth it.

It may be easier to pack a single installer with multiple languages and settings, vs individual languages.

I do remember there being individual language installs before, instead of your 100Gb installer you'd get 10 50Gb installers. On their end and those who enjoy downloading all the languages available it is quite a waste in contrast...

Would it be better or worse? I don't know.

Though i did come across a game with two game folders, one in Japanese and one in English. I used my new fancy md5 file comparison checker and it reduced the 400Mb Japanese game to 2.6Mb (A bunch of Json files, so all text, no audio), making note all the identical files from the English one. Allowing me to have both without the space wasted...

Each has their advantage and disadvantages... In the end there's no way to make everyone happy.

I am guessing that most players that want such games & could afford to buy them would also probably buy a large enough HDD to install the game on(or better yet, would've had one installed beforehand).

If one wants to play the latest and greatest, sometimes one has to pay the cost. And for any who don't have the means to buy such, or don't want to bother, there are thankfully still plenty of worthwhile games and other media that aren't so space consuming.

There's only so much multithreading you can do for a disk-IO-bottlenecked activity like installing/patching.