adikad13000: So they need their own seeders 24/7 for every single game and possibly multiple versions? Like for thousands of games?
Yes? Like they offer all those thousands of games for downloads by other means as well, or how Humble Store seeds all their offline installers as torrents as well?
What is the big problem you are seeing there that I fail to see?
Since we are talking about offline installers, I presume the same rules would apply to the torrent seeds as for direct http downloads. If they don't generally offer several different versions for direct web downloads, then they don't offer them for torrents either. Naturally they can if they so choose.
adikad13000: You might as well just work on your main features, so you give your customers the smoothest experience possible at this point, instead of stretching yourself too thin with new features left and right. Unless GOG already has the resources to do exactly what you're saying, because like I already mentioned torrent relies on the people who already downloaded the game files and are willing to seed.
Of course coming up with new features and services needs resources, gee.
The torrent download option could be quite beneficial to both GOG users and GOG itself.
1. Many GOG users have reported of poor download speeds especially for offline installers using the web browser, to the point they vow never to buy another game from GOG because downloading them is just too slow.
The torrent download option will most probably help most, if not all, of those people, to get faster download speeds especially for popular games that have lots of simultaneous downloaders/seeders. So it is exactly such an important new feature that would make many customers' GOG experience smoother, with much faster downloads.
Torrents don't "rely" on users, who have already downloaded a game, to keep seeding the game from here to eternity. As long as there are some official GOG seeders for each game, everything is fine. The more there are downloaders for a game, automatically the more there will be seeders as well.
That is the beauty of peer-to-peer, it automatically scales with increased downloads.
2. It would also lessen the network capacity usage on GOG download servers when a big part of those downloads would happen between GOG users, not just from GOG servers. In essence, GOG would save money in the long run, especially with mass downloaders using third-party tools like gogrepoc to download and update their whole GOG offline installer library.
I still don't understand how you are trying to frame torrents as somehow "problematic" when they are not. The "issues" that you present are not issues at all.
adikad13000: So they need their own seeders 24/7 for every single game and possibly multiple versions? Like for thousands of games?
vv221: They already have them. These https links you use to download your DRM-free installers can be used as seeds, no need to add anything extra here.
See here for more details:
Using HTTP or FTP servers as seeds for BitTorrent downloads. Good point, I didn't know that.
