EXE's are fine. Compressing them may be counterintuitive, as others have said, if the installer already does some form of compression.
Download managers are not necessary. There's tons of software out there that already does a great job with this if you need that kind of thing. If you have interruptions, just use one of the many Firefox extensions. Keep it simple. Let the user download it with whatever he/she wants.

EXE would be fine with me, but I think rar or zip is a better choice. I prefer rar myself.
Skip the DL Mgr. As many have said, the world has plenty already.. Firefox or any decent browswer can handle things fine. And there are plenty of choices if people want to use something else.

I don't have a problem with it being in .exe but at least for god sakes enable the downloads to resume. I had a problem with my internet last night downloading Lionheart and I had to redownload the whole thing twice. (it takes me an hour for 700mb)

EXE
And please do not make a download manager REQUIRED. If you want to make a optional one thats cool but if you make me download a manager i will never buy a game. And honestly who uses a DM? I download everything through a web browser and it works fine

anyone know if they have considered setting up a private torrent tracker for downloading games? wouldn't take any more bandwidth than what they would currently need for the exe file downloads, and should make downloads quicker as well, especially if there was some bonus given for people who seed...
would also eventually help GOG reduce their bandwidth costs, freeing up money that could be used elsewhere...

keep the files as they are, but have an OPTIONAL java based downloader that supports pausing, resuming and more importantly MD5 checksums.
The biggest problem with downloading files is error checking. Most FTP/HTTP servers already allow pausing and resuming of downloads, however error checking is very minor and can easily result in a broken download. Sometimes can result in files that appear to install and run fine but end up breaking the app in unexpected ways
I say java as it can run within the browser without needing IE for activex, or needing its own little app like steam. and optional if you don't want to (or can't) install java

Please, do not force people to use a download manager. I like having .exe type files that sit on my computer and run and not tied to some downloader/installer.

How is that better than installing one of the many downloader utilities for Windows?
Or installing [insert favorite browser here] downloader extensions?
The wheel's already here, let's not reinvent it.
The provider provides a link to the data. How that link is accessed is up to the user.

I would be very pleased if there was a downlad app.
And i prefer EXE files.

If there is option to continue dl'ing file (just in case) then I'd prefer .exe :]

I second and third some form of helpful file downloader.
Currently I'm grabbing MDK which has been going for nearly an hour @ ~22Kbps. With my current broadband plan in New Zealand, it's free bandwidth after midnight, BUT SLOWWWW.
On peak hours, it's soo much faster than this.

I think he was referring to the indexing service. XP has an inferior one and I believe it's turned off by default. Vista's I think, is ON by default.

I wouldn't mind something that allows me to resume my downloads. My broadband has been on the fritz for the past couple of months and keeps going down every 45 minutes. Downloading Fallout 2 has been an exercise in patience. :(

no, it's the whatchamacallit, UAC? the "thing is requesting permission" thingy.

a downloader app would be nice.
i really dont have a preference between an .exe or .zips.
regardless of the choice of file type, something that would allow GOG's servers to serve at better than 70 - 120kb/s would be much nicer.
the faster GOG serves the happier i am. i picked up freespace 2 last night and there's really no reason a 1.6gb file should take 6 ot 7 hours to complete. (i'm unsure how long it actually ended up taking, when i went to sleep it still had five hours to go)
when i download games from steam i usually get 500 - 700+kb/s. which is a lot more in line with the whole "buy now, play soon!" concept of instant gratification digital distribution focuses on.
right now GOG is sorta... "buy now, play tomorrow!"
that out of the way, i'm basking in GOG's excellence so far.