I don't think that's a conspiracy theory.

Let's look at the facts here;

1. The update requires a stupid amount of drive space compared to what it uses while the full game installer apparently doesn't.

2. As I've pointed out previously it's obvious that GOG have always completely borked their installers by compressing compressed files (which can only make them bigger), they either completely lacked the understanding of how Inno Setup work and bodged it from day one or they did it deliberately. Either way now they've got so many games on the store along with updates they probably consider themselves too far into derp town to do a U-Turn and fix it because that'd take them a lot of bandwidth to do it.

3. We already know Cyberpunk 2077 has a few Galaxy-only features in the form of some slightly crappy cosmetic DLC. You can actually install it without Galaxy but that's not the point. The point is, GOG are clearly trying to push the use of Galaxy Client on people even if we don't need or want it.

To me it seems like they put the stupid disk space requirement in there for two reasons; firstly because of number two above, they've recompressed already-compressed files which just makes them bigger and expanding them might need even more space so they've stuck in an arbitrary requirement to cover themselves for that possible eventuality, but this leads into the second reason in so much as this all has a nice side effect of making people unable to install the update if they lack the space requirement, so what do they do? Well most likely send a support ticket in and what do GOG do?

Tell them to use the Galaxy client.

Edit: Although I will just say I do think suggesting people upgrade their drives, even with a hint of jest, isn't a sane approach. As I said quite early on in the thread I had this issue with my 2TB drive because I "only" had 480GB~ free space left on it. For a game that only takes up 67GB~. The very idea I should go out and buy a new drive just to update one game is ludicrous.

Can you imagine the absolute hate fuck that would occur if Microsoft announced next month that their latest Windows 11 update was going to require a over half a terabyte of disk space to install despite the OS taking up a fraction of that? Twitter and Reddit's servers would detonate with the force of an H-Bomb from the sheer number of frustrated neckbeard screams.

And yet GOG goes and does exactly this with a game that, let's not forget hasn't exactly got the greatest track record even now, and you've got people here just lamenting that "oh well that's GOG for you" and "go buy a new drive" as responses to it?

Good grief.

Try setting different drive for downloading than your game drive.

It's more of a personal opinion. If anyone wants the game to work now, and not wait for a better solution from the GoG developer team or use GoG Galaxy, buying a new storage device is by far the easiest solution.

I haven't used the current beta version of GoG Galaxy 2.0 or whatever the latest version is, because I refuse to use any game client. It's why i buy my games here in the first place. If GoG Galaxy is a functional solution, great, let people know they can patch their games that way.

But for me, I refuse to use a game client so strongly, the option of buying a new drive as a solution is a no-brainer - I will buy the drive every time, without a second thought. And for me the argument is that a larger drive can be used for more than just install a single game.

Maybe it's a wasteful solution, and money and technical know-how does come into play, though there are plenty of manuals out there on how to install a new disk drive on any type of device, but let's be honest about one thing: the solution WORKS, which was the main point.

Fair enough, you're entitled to your opinion, so if you feel buying a new drive is the easiest solution for you then fine. I personally still think it's ludicrous plus I doubt anyone else would agree that it's the easiest solution - I mean, it's subjective but I'd have thought freeing up space or using other existing drives to be easier solutions.

An analogy would be to imagine if your car has five seats and four people get in then someone sticks a bloody great box on the fifth seat. Then a fifth person comes along and wants to get in, but they can't as it's already full because the big box takes up a seat. So to solve that, you go out an buy a brand new car with an extra seat instead of just moving the box onto someone's lap or sticking it in the back. But never mind; this is becoming off-topic.

No one at GOG has bothered to respond to this and I assume those who tried to raise support tickets on this issue got fobbed off too. I'm just going to chalk this one down to "they don't give a toss" and give up caring myself now. I hope those of you who persevere with this complaint have some luck in your endeavour, we'll all thank you if you do.

Judging by all the complaints regarding insufficient storage space, I'd say most do not have that extra space available on any drive they have in their system. Making buying a new drive the logical choice, or at least the easiest choice.

I mean, if they did have the extra space on a different drive, wouldn't they just have used that instead of complaining, or at least phrased the complaint differently (aka towards the disk space requirement instead of "I cannot patch the game")?

The GoG offline installers makes it very easy to install a game elsewhere, and I've tried doing that and copy-paste the game to where I wanted it afterwards. And it has worked every time with no issues at all (such as system registry pathing etc.).

True, moving a game do another drive just to patch it makes it a huge hassle (actually, it would be the proverbial PITA), but is not what the complaining has been about.

Just giving all my reasoning here for my argument that buying a new drive would be the easiest solution.

Your car analogy is a bad one for me though - I got a 2-seater van, and more than once have I considered ripping out the passenger seat, because I prefer to drive alone. ^^
But I see your point - and honestly, that does sound like me - if my car isnt big enough for whatever reason, then of course I will (or at least would want to) buy a new one (I had a Chevy van years ago, and I want to have one again).

But as I have said, the GoG developers needs to make a proper patcher, one that doesn't require 6 times the space of the entire game just to install a patch. Will that ever happen? Well, here's to hoping.

Also you have take into account the SSDs durability. The drive tries to level the wear by constantly moving data. If your drive in nearly full it will just speed up the wear of the disk.

The best solution would be to buy an HDD, which are rather inexpesive these days and set downloading to that drive. You would still need some space on game drive to allocate new files, but it would be much less.

The problem is my game is installed on an SSD, so therefore the installation requires this space on that particular drive. I actually download everything to one of my old-school HDs, because as has been mentioned, HDs suffer less wear and tear therefore constantly downloading to it and deleting it afterwards isn't an issue.

I really didn't want to copy my game to that drive though, install on that drive, and then copy it back - I instead ended up just using Galaxy, which interestingly doesn't have the space issue when upgrading (and also looked like it didn't need to download the entire game either) - and I'd guess that this was much faster than if I'd tried to copy it, patch it and copy it back.

The thing is, if Galaxy can patch the game without downloading all of it, AND it doesn't require an inordinate amount of space - then what the hell is going on with the installers?

(Although I should add I'm not 100% sure that Galaxy didn't in fact download the entire game again and just copy it over the top - it just seemed like it didn't take that long...).

And yes I personally would definitely 100% prefer to not ever use any third-party client to install things - but in this case it was the best option (short of buying a new drive, which I should probably do soon but I'm too lazy).
No, the easiest option now is to do it via the Galaxy client, not install a new drive.

Or, you know, download the full installation and install that instead. Depending on how far away people live from their nearest shop that sells HDs, what transport they have available, and what sort of internet they have, this might even be faster.

But I'm sure everyone on here has solved this one way or another by now.

The issue is: GOG should do something so this doesn't happen again.

Or, at the very least,. post some kind of warning that the installer is batshit crazy, and requires > 10x the game's original installation size to patch, so that way people are at least informed and can instead opt to either use Galaxy, or just download the entire new version instead.

FWIW, I did contact support, and they acknowledged it was a known issue.

They recommended using Galaxy to avoid the issue.

Obviously this is not a solution if the computer you're trying to play on doesn't have internet access, but it is what it is. This was my circumstance, so what I ended up doing was downloading the whole game fresh as offline installers on my phone (instead of just the patch), and then re-installing the whole game from offline installers. Unlike the patch installer, the offline full installer does not have this bug.