Interesting, I'll need to look into this. Thanks for providing a link.

IMHO it has to be content acquisition and developer / publisher retention.

A year ago I would have said "fix the site" or "faster downloads" or "more support"...

... but...

... as the industry quickly contracts...

... due to the worsening global economy...

... more-and-more content is going to move toward DRM and the monolithic delivery systems (Steam... or other proprietary launchers).

GOG needs to move quickly to secure content and retain devs / publishers.

But seeing recent hiring notices it would seem GOG knows this is vital for the near future.

Well, they exist. Lutris, Minigalaxy, and other such solutions. Just that GOG has not deigned to reach out and give their blessing to any of them, for some damned baffling reason.

In favour of what?

I doubt you are implying they should only distribute game through their DRM system (so-called "launcher") Galaxy… So are you suggesting basic extract-and-run archives in standard formats like .zip or .tar.gz? Or following the current trend of huge static binaries revival, like Flatpak and AppImage? Something else I am not thinking of?

I would be happy with standard archives, especially as I am already treating as archives the Innosetup (Windows) and MojoSetup (Linux) installers currently provided, extracting their contents without running their executable part.

Just standard archives. ZST, shrunken head filesystems, other magic compression is available.

I’m with you on that. I would even settle for good ol’ .tar.gz archives if they think xz and zstd are too modern.

Helping me make my games last forever of course:
- Make it a lot easier to backup your offline installers
- Focus on integrating aging games in the catalog with existing compatibility solutions (ex: wine) to keep them running
- Converge in-game Galaxy features with an offline version that makes it easy to switch off Galaxy without breaking the game and hopefully support as many features as possible offline (at least, it seems like multiplayer and achievements would definitely be achievable)

Not sure if those things would be enough of a differentiation keep GOG afloat financially with recurring customers honestly, but having a game collection that I can play offline in perpetuity (my descendants can keep playing after I'm gone until everything is in the public domain) is why I'm here.

The best world-wide cdn they can afford. One of the most basic functions of any store is the ability to reliably deliver the item(s) being sold.