Posted October 01, 2016
Seriously though, if you report a dead GOG Downloader link to them right now you will get back a form letter telling you to use Galaxy instead, with a comment that if you still want them to fix the downloader link to let them know. This shows that they consider those dead links a low priority to fix, and that they want everyone switching to Galaxy for downloading sooner rather than later.
What's going to happen, is that there will be a certain percentage of users that go along with that and switch to Galaxy and not respond further to the support request to get them to fix the original request concerning the broken link. As the percentage of people who go along with the Galaxy suggestion rise, and the number of people who write them back and tell them "no, I want the link fixed" decline it will cross a threshold where they consider there too few people still using the GOG Downloader as a percentage of their overall userbase, and decide not only to no longer fix the broken links, but to not bother updating them at all. Once they make that decision, they're going to remove the downloader entirely, and start pruning the links from the site as well.
They will still have the ability to download via the web browser of course (highly recommended to use downloader plugins for resuming and more reliability in that case), but the plan all along was for Galaxy to eventually replace the usage of GOG Downloader.
It has been 2 years+ now, and they are clearly moving in the direction of getting rid of the downloader IMHO. I predict that within 3-6 months the GOG Downloader will no longer be available and people need to start planning whether they're going to switch to Galaxy for downloading, or resort back to using the web browser, or option #3 which will be to wait for someone to reverse engineer the Galaxy API to be able to create 3rd party downloader-only clients (probably the best all around option IMHO). Option #4 for some people who are particularly upset about all of this may be to stop shopping here of course, but hopefully people will deal with option #1 or 2 in the interim and wait for option #3 to avail itself as it most certainly will I'm sure.
Personally, I no longer use GOG Downloader but I don't want to see it go away any time soon either as it is a nice fallback, but the writing is on the wall IMHO, and it is about to become eradicated soon I've got good reasons to believe.