That's certainly one solution. Static 10GB (or whatever) per user probably deliberately wasn't selected because some users with a small collection were running at a loss. Different limits per game (eg, more for AAA RPG's) is too hard to get right (they'd literally have to play-test each and every game to try and find the average per game, and even then it would fail vs multi-user households with 2-3 different characters). They could do tiers (as you suggest) but then people who bought 1 game here will complain "Well Steam doesn't limit my one game..." Maybe GOG simply needs to admit increasingly bloated game sizes vs dwindling GOG finances are on a collision course that quotas alone won't really fix for everyone and perhaps add a feature to Galaxy to let people store their game saves / Galaxy data on their own GDrive / OneDrive / DropBox accounts (exactly as ScummVM does).

I don't know about Steam cloud limits. I own Half Life 1-2 and Portal as well, but the only reason I bought them is that I could play them DRM-Free entirely offline and client-less, so I've simply never played any game through the Steam client or used their cloud saves at all. Perhaps someone else knows more.

And isn't that the case with everything they do?
I often think, in their staff meetings, as soon as someone throws in a (generally) nice idea, they all whoop and holler and the boss says: "that's a great idea! - let's do this!"...and nobody in the round thinks even a second about, how this new feature needs to be implemented, to work properly.
It's always only "a good idea" - which then gets implemented, without having any second thoughts about the deeper implications.

I often wonder how differently things would have turned out if instead of rushing into making Galaxy in 2014 "Full Steam Ahead" (pun intended), GOG had instead been a bit more patient and waited a few years for Playnite / Heroic Launcher to mature, then worked closer with the open-source community into integrating pre-existing cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) into that and simply stored everyone's GOG metadata (cloud save / time tracking, etc), "decentralised". Zero cost cloud storage, native Linux version (possibly with pre-integrated Proton), "You own a 1TB OneDrive / GDrive plan or 10TB NAS = you have a full 1-10TB cloud save storage space" all whilst spending only a fraction of what they blew reinventing another Windows-only Galaxy-shaped walled garden that never realistically was going to "Out-Steam Steam"...

If a cloud data limit is your defining reason for not supporting games on GOG, then I wonder what brought you here to begin with...

If you like having your saves, stop being a lazy git and back them up to external media m8. With all the blackrock dosh their parent company is getting, I don't think money is too much of a problem.

If you are suggesting that GOG would have to reserve 10GB per user beforehand, even for users who use only a fraction or none of that, I'd be surprised if they really had to do that.

I think it is quite feasible to start reserving more hard drive space for users' cloud saves only when the current reserved storage space is going over a limit. At my work in a smaller scale hybrid cloud, that was quite normal that storage space was added for clients on the fly only when they e.g. reached 80% or 90% full capacity, sometimes even more. With some clients it was even agreed we add add more free storage space to them after certain threshold.

So it isn't like if GOG has e.g. 500.000 users or at least accounts, they would have to have 5 million GBs of cloud save space available already there and then. Maybe they'd actually need only 10% of that.

About maintaining the cloud saves, I feel it might also make sense that inactive (uninstalled) save games that haven't been used for one or a couple of years, would also be automatically deleted from people's cloud saves. GOG would just need to inform people so that they are not surprised why their 5 year old The Witcher (1) cloud saves are not there anymore. If someone really cares that much for some years old saves of a finished game, they could keep that game installed on their account so that it appears active, hence its cloud saves are safe (pun intended).
I think it is plausible both DRM-free and the ease of use of clients (cloud saves included) could matter to many.

Like in my case, right now I would actually benefit from cloud saves because the laptop where I have been playing Planescape: Torment EE might get its hard drive erased on a short notice (and I'd lose my save games in the process), and also I many times want to play that game further on another PC than the one where I normally play it.

Yet, at the same time, DRM-free is still the main reason I buy games on GOG. I could live without a client for single-player games, but I can understand for some lack of it might be a dealbreaker, even if they see benefit with DRM-free offline installers as well.


EDIT: And the real answer to "I wonder what brought you here to begin with...", I wouldn't be surprised for quite many it was The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk GOG code that they got with their brandnew NVidia graphics card, or some GOG codes they got as part of their Amazon Prime subscription or something. I could understand many such people would probably have been quite angry if the only option would have been an offline installer divided into 50 parts... :)

I think I would consider a complete streaming subscription with your prediction

Because one can want online fatures for now, and the surety that their purchase will still function years down the road.

Easy way to backup your saves locally without cloud storage

1: Get a USB flash drive
2: Go to PCGamingWiki for the save game data location
3: Pin the save data location to Quick Access
4: Backup the save game data location to the USB flash drive

Done. Backing up your saves locally without the cloud is not that hard :)

That makes sense if you treat online features as a useful extra, not something you flat out refuse to play a game without.

I had one bad experience with GOG Cloud Save when it was new, it wiped my Dragon's Dogma, ever since them no issue. But honestly, I keep all my save files in a backup just in case, mainly because I don't often play through the Galaxy Launcher.

But saying you won't buy new games from this platform because of that is very, very trivial. I'd suggest making backups till they increase this feature. GOG is no Steam, EA or MS, they focus on selling game-installers 1st.

So why not backup the games yourself then?
Why rely on cloud saves?

I have no idea what you are talking about.

Unless you can present some facts, I am going to call bogus.

Once could argue, that GOG have already been just hanging on for quite some time, and are now resorting to tougher measures, which seems like desperation to some of us ... it's reasonable to suspect that anyway.

Their latest cutback, maybe, is the Movies section of GOG, now gone as of the end of January. Quite why they held onto it for so long I doubt we will ever know.

Offline Installers, while available through Galaxy as an Extras option, is rarely talked about by GOG, and never promoted. Why would that be, when GOG's main selling point, or used to be, is DRM-Free? Using the Download & Install method of Galaxy, is not encouraging folk to be independent of the GOG store, but instead making gamers more reliant on GOG's continued existence, to access their games via an online connection through the Galaxy client, rather than via backups if you downloaded the Offline Installers.

How long before Offline Installers are seen as an unnecessary added expense?

Fair points, though we don't have enough facts to go on, only speculation based on personal observation. It could be true, but might not be. I personally presumed enough of us bought enough games to cover those who haven't. Especially, as I suspect many like me, don't even use Cloud Storage.

Though it would be true, I suspect, that GOG sell to many more gamers now, many of whom, probably most, who don't particularly care about DRM-Free, and who just use the direct Download & Install option of Galaxy. There could be a lot of GOG customers like that, perhaps the majority, and they only have a handful of games each at GOG.

Without GOG actively promoting Offline Installers, most gamers who come to GOG's shores, are probably using GOG much like they use Steam, via the client. And that does not bode well, in my opinion, for GOG's long term survival.

GOG's survival would surely rely on customers coming back to GOG time and time again, and buying games, not those who just buy a handful, as high in numbers as they might be, they will only help GOG short term, and like has been claimed likely incur costs greater than profits.

Many who come here, seem to think it is GOG versus Steam, when it can never be so. Steam are just too big, and don't have the issues and restrictions that GOG have. The only store that can take on a behemoth like Steam is Epic and currently they are doing all the right things, which by necessity is a long and slow process.