All the guff raised over the Downloader issue has me thinking. How many games are sold and downloaded in a typical day (by typical I mean day that doesn't have any promotions running or anything else that might cause a spike in downloading)?

Since GoG has invested in a whole server farm dedicated to running downloads all day and night, I'm pretty sure that it doesn't matter whether you use a Downloader or your browser, since both would connect to the same place. Since GoG's end of the connection is a constant, the only variables would be the quality of a given user's ISP, and the odd power outage on either end of the connection.

That said, the only situation in which a download manager would be truly advantageous would be if a user had a transfer limit, imposed by their ISP. An example would be a satellite based ISP such as WildBlue or HughesNET, which place a transfer limit over a rolling period of time (30 days and 24 hours, respectively for the aforementioned providers). Of course, even then, a decent satellite ISP will provide the end-user with a "free o' clock block", usually placed in the wee hours of the morning (for me, it's in between 2am and 7am, and speed is unrestricted), in which the user can download as much as he or she wants without impacting the transfer limit. ISPs that provide this unrestricted download time often also provide download scheduling tools, encompassing all transfers, be it browser downloads, or even Windows Updates. I have yet to find such a tool to work with Steam, and so I have to get up from bed just to start and stop downloads.

So back to my original question: How much traffic does the GoG server farm manage in any given 24h period? Does it even come close to straining the limits? I mean, it's not like it's running a bunch of multiplayer lobbies, is it? Does GoG run it's own multiplayer farm too?

i cant help you with advanced statistics, but i think in the videos explaining the end of beta or the related interviews they said how many games they sold, based on that you can roughly come up with how many games per day are sold

If it helps I have downloaded games during sales and normal days and the speed caps out on my isp. My speed is about 600KBps.

I don't think this is a good measure. I can get really fast speeds during an extended time in my area from Comcast but I cap out on game downloads generally under 200KB/sec. It doesn't seem to matter weather I have 1 going or multiples, they all cap out at around the same amount, 200KB/sec or under.

All browser downloads I've gotten from GoG also cap at around 200KBps, and I'm a HughesNET customer. That said, my uTorrent downloads run the gamut from 30KBps to 175KBps. I think this is indicative of the fact that it really depends on the server you're downloading from that determines your speed.

The point of my question was to determine whether or not any of us are really in danger of having our connection to the server interrupted on GoG's end.

I think they said they bought a bunch of bandwidth and hosting for the relaunch and then bought more to handle the load afterwards. Scaling for load seems to have been part of the relaunch and I am comfortable assuming they have built bandwidth costs into even the promo prices (they have quite a bit of data to go off of for setting these).

I think in a youtube conference video they spoke about 1 million games sold last year and in the end-of-beta-phase-video about 2 million games sold since the start. Judging from Alexa popularity graphs the number of visits has been increasing ever since with a spike last christmas. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gog.com

So my guess is that they are now at least at a sales level that is equivalent to about 2 million sells per year. Some people download more than once, say this makes 3 million downloads or: ~8000 downloads per day.

One download has average size 500 MB, so in total per day: 4 TB.

If downloads would be evenly spread across the day (which probably isn't, I guess there is a spike during day hours of North America) this corresponds to a download speed: ~46MB/sec or 370Mbit . That is already quite much.

Compared with Steam however it is only small scale. On their site they speak of 52000-180000 Mbit or about 300 times more than my estimate for GOG. But well, Steam also has to deliver large updates and large files all the time and has server farms all across the world. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

No, they did never state 2 million games sold. They said 2 million games downloaded.

I've downloaded some of my games 4-5 times by now.

And I haven't even downloaded some (well, most) of my games before the PR stunt. Now of course I made backups. Maybe a lot of people went by the same principle.

Well, they said that in the first year of GOG.com they sold 1.000.000 games, and they want to double it this year (so they want to sell 2.000.000).

Which means that in the first year they sold about 83.500 games per month, which is about 2750 games daily. Which is about 114 games per hour, and almost two games per minute.

You can double this stats for the results of this year.

Ah, that would make a difference. However if going word by word, 2 million games downloaded could still mean 2 million games sold.

What I want to say is that with Baldurs Gate, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale and more of such block busters to come, I would wonder If they are not selling 2 million games this year. And if everybody re-downloads their games much more than one time (I downloaded them all only once) then traffic could easily be several times higher than estimated above.