Hi there, i was thinking about improving the gog experience. How would it be to have a cli client for gog?

It should be available in path so one could easily use it from everywhere within your powershell/terminal.

I'am thiking about a usage like

gog-get install witcher3

it then installs to a default folder which you could set in a config file or change with a cli option like -of (output folder)


I would actually like that very much.

Sounds alright but someone would have to make it and also get GOG to share information about Galaxy first if you cannot get them to do it.

this was meant to be read by cdpr and i want to encourage them to make it ;)

So show support if you like it.

I think CD Projekt Red are busy enough with Cyberpunk 2077 right now, to start developing clients for GOG. :P I'm afraid the end result will be the same, but technically the proper place for that is to create an entry here.

What do you have against Macs?

Obviously nothing since they weren't mentioned. :-p

Seriously, it's suppose to be just a drag and drop install on Macs anyway, and the same into the trash for uninstall. Doesn't get much easier than that.

Their mice don't even have buttons on them, not a single button; the mouse simply is the button. When it's as simple as that, it's unlikely more than a few if anyone at all knows what a command line is either.

On the other hand, GOG did make a version of Galaxy for the Mac, pretty much in the most un-Mac-like way possible. *sigh*

What do you have against emacs?

Frankly, I'd be much more interested in an emacs mode for GOG rather than fiddling with the throwaway interface of a shell.

Wasn't there already some thread or other GOG discussion where people are figuring out the Galaxy API? And I think e.g. lgogdownloader already supports and uses lots of Galaxy API features, IIRC.

What I'd like to have the most at this point (officially from GOG, or a third-party tool like gogrepo or lgogdownloader) was the optional ability to use peer-to-peer technology (similar to bittorrent) for downloads, ie. GOG users are sharing bandwidth with each other so that people could get max download speed more constantly, GOG download servers would be hit less, and I wouldn't feel bad for downloading dozens or even hundreds of gigabytes of new games or updates from GOG servers for my purchased games.

But it would have to be optional because on some networks p2p doesn't necessarily work that well, or some routers flip from all the constant connection attemps with p2p, or some people have tight data transfer quotas that they probably don't want to waste for serving others (yes I am talking about TinyE).

Many applications and services nowadays seem to have such, e.g. Windows 10 itself has it, the MapFactor navigator on my Android phone supports it (you can select if you download offline maps to MapFactor either directly from their servers, or from other users with p2p), and I recall that at least earlier Battle.net had optional p2p for content delivery.

You shouldn't feel bad for using a service you paid for.

Besides, bandwidth is dirt cheap.

Depends. I pay for a game only once (sometimes something laughable like one euro or such), yet I may keep redownloading it over and over again. It might just as well be that pricing on GOG (and Steam, and other similar services) is optimized with the assumption that people download a game only when they intend to play it, and not like me who has downloaded his whole game collection in one swoop, and keeps downloading all possible updates for them too (with gogrepo).

It is a bit like a restaurant offering "all you can eat" for 10€ I would feel kinda bad if I was a superhuman who can eat like a horse, I might feel I am misusing their offer.

After all, not all digital stores have offered "unlimited downloads" either. Like when I bought a bunch of DRM-free games straight from Strategy First's own store, they offered only a limited download option. Either you were supposed to download all your game installers within certain timespan, or it was that you could download them only a few times. So I downloaded them all from their store right away, and have kept them on my hard drives ever since.

And overall, I just consider p2p technology a nice idea, taking advantage of bandwidth that would otherwise be unused, a kind of community service. Plus, I am pretty sure we would see less of "why are GOG downloads so slow?" complaints as well.

You really shouldn't feel bad. The people who download a game only once (or, like me, buy tons of games but never download them!) easily outnumber and subsidize the few that like to download everything. You're literally just a few cups of coffee. Don't worry, it's all tracked and factored in (the CDNs come with their analytics tools). Your downloading isn't going to make a dent in GOG's budget.

I just ate a pizza. I could've had more than a terabyte of traffic (on a decent server) to go with it for less.

Restaurants are a little different because they do not have the benefits that massive scale brings you. But they're still factoring in the possibility of bigbellies coming in and eating way more than normal people would (or they're gambling their money, and if they want to do that, one shouldn't feel bad for them).

I've sayed about that just yesterday!

That would lighten the traffic on the GoG CDN, but would be complicated to dedicate resources to its developing.

Also, the force of GoG is its simplicity : buy -> download -> play. Even without internet, without DRM, without anything that isn't strictly required.

And, finally, bandwidth isn't so expensive: they already pay for their server and I don't think they "pay" based on how much bandwidth they used.

I dunno. I am unsure what exactly it would take to implement such system, but for some reason Humble Bundle has come up with some kind of p2p solution, and I am pretty sure they have less resources and staff than GOG. The DRM-free installers (both for PC and Android games) have links both to direct web downloads, as well as bittorrent links where you get to use any bittorrent client to download your games. Not sure how exactly they check that you are a legit downloader and not "tapping in" to content you shouldn't be downloading, or do they just trust you not having access to torrent links to games you haven't purchased? Someone who is familiar with bittorrent innards probably knows...

And as said, many other services and apps seem to have implemented it too, like the Android freeware car navigation program I mentioned, or Windows 10, or the Battle.net client (at least in the past). If bandwidth is cheap, why then are the others still doing it? Plus, it wouldn't necessarily have to be officially from GOG, could be third-party tool too, as long as it allowed only legit customers to "tap in". I certainly wouldn't want to serve any filthy pirates, they never shower yech.

Anyway, the most important reasons I'd like to see optional p2p protocol used is that it would probably better guarantee high download speeds also for those freaks with 100Mbps - 1Gbps internet lines, and also be an option for those who currently complain they are getting too slow download speeds. I personally am fine and pretty much always get full download speed on my measly 10Mbps internet line, albeit occasionally I've seen some web downloads come only at 400kbps or so (but if I download several files at the same time, it doesn't matter as together they max out my internet connection anyway).

And if it helps the GOG CDN servers as well, all the better. I guess I am also fearing that GOG considers third-party mass-downloader tools like gogrepo and lgogdownloader "unwelcome" because of the extra load they can cause to GOG servers, and possibly try to somehow restrict or even prevent their usage. For instance:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/gogrepopy_python_script_for_regularly_backing_up_your_purchased_gog_collection_for_full_offline_e/post1303

(albeit that is not really related to download speeds, but at the rate of which GOG is serving incoming http requests, I presume)

I keep saying it would have to be optional anyway, so it is not like a normal user would even see it. You could enable it separately, or even use a completely different tool/client for it.

Until Galaxy arrived, I presume Steam was the place where people looking for simplicity went by default. Installing and playing GOG games was always a bit more involved, having to separately download several installer parts, install the game manually, then if an update was released for the game, many times it meant downloading and re-installing the whole game (no auto-update either).

But yeah, the lack of DRM is also certain kind of "simplicity". Just a different kind of simplicity. :)

Really? I have no idea how the pricing goes with many CDN server providers and such, but I presume people downloading more does somehow increase GOG's costs. I did at some point get involved on e.g. how Microsoft charges for usage of their Azure cloud services, I am pretty sure there were at least different price points to how much you were expecting traffic and downloads from "your" cloud servers. I don't recall if there were options where you were automatically charged more if there were more users and data transfers, or would excess users just be blocked away.

GOG is big enough that they have some custom negotiated contract, so we really can't tell how it's priced. I know there are plans where you pay a roughly fixed sum for the tier of service you get, and bandwidth from thereon is basically free. But I'm not going to speculate.

It helps to try put things into perspective. Consider TW3, which sold (or was redeemed) on GOG like 700k copies within the first month after release. I think it's fair to say that most of these people did not pay the full launch price just to have it sit in their backlog. In other words, most of them likely downloaded and played the game. How big is the download? Something like 30 gigabytes.

30 gigabytes times 700k users is 21 petabytes. For a *single title* in just one month. It's a back of an envelope type of calculation, but it should give us some sense of scale.

What I'm trying to get across is that the masses are already driving so much traffic that a little "excessive" [not really because you are entitled to it] downloading from a handful of forum users who like to backup the entire collection is nothing more than a drop of pee in the ocean. Yes, it costs money [which comes from your and my wallet] and that cost relative to all the traffic GOG is paying for is so abysmally small that it does not even amount to visible noise on the charts.

Stop worrying about it. They won't even notice.

Yes, P2P would be nice.

EDIT: If you look at the public prices on CDNs (which most likely aren't what GOG actually pays, because big customers always negotiate), the low is around $0.02 per GB, or one US dollar for a 50 gigabyte download. By comparison, the VPS & dedicated hosting provider I checked (Vultr, and they are hardly ever the cheapest) offers a $5 VPS with 1TB of traffic ($0.005 per GB or 200 gigabytes for one dollar), and bare metal servers with similar pricing. The price includes hardware, storage, IP address, support, backups, etcetra. So if we could factor that out, the traffic should be much cheaper. How big is the GOG catalog right now? A few TB? That's a pizza, a coke, and a few cups of coffee. But you've given GOG way more than that by the time you've bought the entire catalog. How much is the catalog? Let's suppose you get 2250 games for a lowly sale price of $2 a pop. That's unlikely, but that's okay. Let's assume GOG takes the "industry standard" 30% of the sale price. You gave them at least $1350, or 67.5TB of traffic at $0.02/GB. Of course that money pays for support, maintenance, development, etc. costs, and there's tax innit too, but let's not forget that the main job of a digital distribution store is to distribute digitally. You're literally buying traffic when you buy a game on GOG.

edit: Nevermind. I'm getting things off topic.

I was going to comment on CDN pricing and how we arrange things but that's just getting away from the discussion at hand.