I haven't made a purchase here since Aug 2024 (just checked my Orders and Settings page), and trust me when I tell you that I rarely went a month without orders from Nov 2008 till 2024. The reason, Gog's atrocious download speeds. I have posted many times on the subject, showing how it's GOG, and ONLY GOG that I experienced the problems. I took screenshots showing me downloading from Gog compared to other sites (like Nexus), sometimes even at the same time, where I would get 40 to 70 MB/s from Nexus and still, always, forever, the GOG speed was between 3 and 5 MB/s. Always capped at about 5 MB/s. Always.

Didn't matter the day, the time, nothing. Here all I get is 5, while I can then start a second download from say Nexus or OOTP (gaming company specializing in sports sims) while Gog is still downloading and get 40 to 70 MB/s from those sites while Gog's speeds stayed around 5.The consensus here seemed to believe it had something to do with GOG changing the server vendors to a company now called "Fastly" IIRC. (Another example of propaganda in use... slow download speeds but we'll name it Fastly, that should do the trick.). I can't confirm that, but I can say that I've been here since 2008 and I did indeed used to get good download speeds here but it changed a few years ago and apparently that's when Gog changed companies as well so there is at least anecdotal evidence that this theory is correct..

I am not going to buy here again unless and until it's fixed.

However, today I learned something new. I decided to download the Stalker Enhanced Edition of Clear Sky. So I cross myself to prepare for waiting a couple hours and.... WTF??? Am I seeing right??? 60 MB/s??? Whoa, I guess Gog fixed their issues.

So I tried another game, one that I have downloaded many times. 4.4 MB/s. Wait, what? So, here's what I did next. I picked another game I had downloaded before and had always seen the speeds capped at around 5 (Drakensang) then added a second download simultaneously (this one Stalker Call of Pripiot). WTF? I took a screenshot. The game I had issues with before was still having issues (Drakensang) BUT, Stalker Call of Pripiot was blazing fast. Wait, what?

So then I cancelled the Call of Pripiot download so that the only one downloading was Drakensang and... between 3 and 5 MB/s.

So it seems to be based on which games you download? How can that be? Makes no sense to me. But you can see in the screenshots that downloading the Stalker games got speeds I get normally everywhere else (between 40 and 70 MB/s) while Drakensang stays stuck between 3 and 5 MB's.

I tried another Stalker game. BLAZING FAST. Tried Gothic. Capped at 5. Added another Stalker (see screenshot 4) where Stalker is blazing fast and Gothic is not.

What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On???????????????

I think it might be where the game data is hosted and/or maybe how the game is coded (though I doubt that last one) but I have noticed at times similar oddness .. usually its the older games that have the slowest speeds .. unless they are ones that was added to gog recently .. and I have noticed after a while even they get a lower capped rate .. like they get a lower priority server for users to get them from or something after the majority of who will buy em gets em or something..

Not saying thats why but there is tthat odd common theme on my end of that happening if no one else

I'm in the USA as well, and have noticed the exact same thing. Different speeds for different games.

SOME (not all) new releases and SOME more popular games get high speeds, while older and lesser-known games get very low speeds.

I don't know if GOG might actually charge the publisher more money for higher-speed downloads for their games, but that's the theory I'm going with for now.

As I've said before, different areas and download servers seem to behave differently.

I've noticed some download servers seem to have some arbitrary download speed limits like 5 MBytes/s, sometimes that seems to be per file (so if you download three files at the same time, you might get total 3x 5MBytes/sec = 15 MBytes/sec download speed). I don't know if that was the case for OFG as well, ie. was it 5MB/s total download speed, or per file?

I just tested it again, and my experience is the same as before: I get around 30 MBytes/sec total download speed, regardless of which game or how many files I am downloading simultaneously.

I just tested it with Gothic 2 Gold and one of those STALKER enhanced games that OFG mentioned, both came at around 30MB/s (tested one download at a time). My theoretical max download speed would be around 75MBytes/sec (= 600 Mbits/sec).
I was using the EDGE browser in Windows 11 Pro.

What can I say? Either you are lucky, or you are not. I have no idea why the different GOG download servers seem to have different behavior and rules.

Not only slow speeds, but i've been having instances of when downloading through Galaxy actually chokes my internet connection(As in my overall connection on my pc sharply degrades during a download). This never happens on anything else in my system and it's been exclusively whenever i'm trying to download on the Galaxy client. WTF is the reasoning for that to happen?!

This is strange and could really only be explained by QoS or different sources running at different loads.

Many years ago, I also had download problems with GOG. I simply couldn't get above 3-4 Mbps, and sometimes it dropped to a few kbps. So I can understand your frustration. The problem disappeared overnight, and since then, I've had 50 Mbps of bandwidth available.

In fact, sometimes I only have 25%-50% of that available. This is very rare, and usually the next day, the download works at full bandwidth.

I often notice people downloading their games via WiFi. This won't be the case for you if you're downloading at 70 MB, but I'll mention it anyway, maybe it will help other forum members here. Downloading via LAN cable (Ethernet) is much more stable and faster.

One more question. You're in the US, and the GOG servers are located somewhere in the EU. Do you also have full bandwidth for downloads when accessing other data within the EU? I'm just asking to rule out the possibility that your ISP has somehow throttled access to the EU. A configuration error in the routers could be enough. Or the more recent games and games that have received current patches/versions are on a high-performance server farm with a faster connection and a lot of older stuff is on a discontinued box. Maybe because they have different performance (older and newer ones, of course) or because they have different network connections.

All I can say is that I download almost all of them at full bandwidth. Mine is just over 50 Mbps. As you mentioned, I can squeeze out a bit more with parallel downloads, around 60 Mbps.

Edit:

IMPORTANT!
I forgot to mention that I only download all my games as offline installation files via the browser and don't use Galaxy!

Is that megabits/second or megabytes/second?

Browsers normally report the download speeds as megabytes/sec and I think Galaxy does too, while Steam reports them as megabits/second which is important to remember when comparing the download speeds between Steam and GOG/Galaxy.

Sorry, I was in a hurry. I mean megabytes/second. :)

The short answer is that not even GOG knows, since they now rely on Fastly as a CDN, so these sort of "problems" are out of their hands.

Some games that are properly distributed geographically will be fine for most people, others, which for some reason are not, will download like molasses.

I've had general issues with downloads from GOG for two months now, wherein any other service would saturate my bandwidth, however downloads from GOG would average at around 1/2 MB/s . Reached out to GOG support, and after a flurry of "the problem is on your end", which it was not, they said nothing can be done about it.

Four days ago, out of the blue, GOG downloads have started almost always saturating my bandwidth. Send a mail to my ISP, they said nothing changed on their end. I also didn't change any setting or configuration.

If you have problems with GOG downloads, do you know who to blame? Gremlins, it's always gremlins. Fastly, as any respectable CDN, does a lot of local caching (and by "local" I mean geographically distributed), so depending on where you are downloading from, you're bound to hit different download servers. This won't be outright visible to you, as a user, since their DNS will always be the same, but the balancing happens internally, within the Fastly network. So you'll end up on an IP (of a Fastly mirror) which is closest to you and, theoretically at least, should give you the best download speed. So "the GOG servers", as you call them, although they're subcontracted rather than owned by GOG, are most likely not located in the EU for US folks.

The problem here is very rarely the user or a user's ISP, unless the ISP does indeed throttle you without honestly telling you that's the case (that should be visible in other places beside GOG though), but rather how close you are and how good of a connection you have to the nearest Fastly mirror.

The short response, is the very slow download speeds happened immediately for many of us, after the CDN crash in mid 2023.

I currently max out still at 1.6 Megabytes a second, whereas before the 2023 event it was just over 5 Megabytes. Since then my web connection has increased greatly in speed, but no improvement with GOG downloads, and I am just about to get my speed quintupled, and I don't expect to see any difference with GOG, except that for some time now I have managed to improve things by using a multiple thread downloader for the Offline Installers. I haven't downloaded anything from GOG for a couple of days, so if a beneficial change has occurred, I am yet to discover it. As I stated elsewhere a few days ago, I hope the recent CDN issue may have improved things. I have long suspected it is due to cost cutting by GOG, where they no longer pay Fastly to host files closer to many of us ... or have deliberately limited the single thread speed ... and not to a percentage, but to a specific speed.

It is not due to my ISP, that I know for sure, as it would be too much of a huge coincidence, with the slow speed occurring simultaneously to many of us in different locations around the world.

I have now tested this, by downloading a bunch of game updates from GOG, and there has been no change in the lousy single thread download speed for me.

I've been steadily buying games from GOG since May 2017, and for two years now I have had to tolerate this lousy single thread download speed of (at most, often less than) 1.6 megabytes a second, whereas previous download speed for many years with GOG, was around 5 Megabytes a second.

I am currently on a 100 Megabit connection, soon to be increased to 500 Megabits.

GOG download speeds are slow and it is hard to find the cause. The user device, the ISP, the CDN, and the websites can all slow things down. Each part can have problems like congestion or poor connection. Identifying the exact cause is difficult. Try to download outside peak times.

Of course, without this geographical distribution, bottlenecks would arise, and traffic over the backbones would be unnecessarily and permanently burdened. This is also one of the main reasons why companies outsource such processes.

You can see where the packets are coming from, and you can also check the connection. Whether using simple on-board tools like traceroute or network analysis tools like Wireshark, you can get to the bottom of the issue. But that's not necessarily conclusive.

When I was still working in data centers, configuration errors sometimes led to undesirable results. Whether it was on the router, the firewall, the load balancer or on the file servers themselves. So yes, I also think that errors on the customer's end can usually be ruled out if full bandwidth can be used to load from other sources.

PS:
Oh, and by the way... as if it were bad karma, last night I only had 1-4 megabytes/s downloading (no matter what game). This morning it's back up to 50.