There is nothing to agree or disagree with, it was simply a factual statement about the current state of technology.

Or, to correct myself: you can disagree if you want - I can't stop you from being wrong

I do that too, with a collection of a similar size. I decided early to ignore all patches, and download full installers only.

I really don't think anyone using GOG should be steered towards using a client... Not that GOG doesn't do that themselves, very heavily in fact, but at least from the remaining "old guard" of the community, those who were already here before Galaxy was a thing...

Otherwise, games themselves should handle their own patching really. It used to be a thing back in the day, and why not still? Make a separate patcher executable, not the main one (can't patch the game if it's running anyway), which will connect to the store if it's a store-specific build, and check for updates and install if the user desires it.

Because 99.9% of gamers are using a client that will do that for them. No game developer is going to waste one second of time on such a thing. It's more reasonable for non-game apps, which are commonly available directly from devs. That would be the worst way of going about doing updates. On a Mac you'd almost certainly use the Sparkle update framework; Windows also has some update frameworks (including WinSparkle).

Even a lot of Linux distros have access to delta updates or otherwise incremental patching systems.

sigh... patches...
I'd be happy fur the game installers to be as vanilla as possible. with a bunch of patches "from 1.0 to X.Y" so I could manage stuff myself. but I do understand it's inconvenient fur others.
and having 1.0 installers alongside with the latest ones is a huge space hit fur the servers.

Well then dont patch 1,200 games ALL AT ONCE.

Only the ones you actually want to play.

To me it was understandable to expect the offline installers to have separate patches back when there was no Galaxy client available.

Now that there is, and it includes an easy way to lkeep your installed games up to date, I can understand better if the offline installers wouldn't have separate patches. And as said, I would even prefer not having the separate patches as long as the main installers were always up to date, which is not always the case unfortunately. To me having the main installers up to date is much more important than having separate patches.

99,9 % of gamers play ad-filled free-to-play mobile games on Android. Yet, some developers still care for the minority of players who would rather play on PC, without advertisement.

99,9 % of PC gamers play multiplayer-only DRM-ridden games. Yet, some developers still care for the minority of PC players who would rather play DRM-free games.

That's not even remotely true. As of last year in the game industry, mobile games accounted for $92 billion and PC games accounted for $40 billion. Again, not actually true. In any case, asking developers to waste time and effort on catering to one person who wants games on GOG to be self-patching is literally insane. There's simply no reason for it.

99.7% of gamers aren't normally worried about being excluded from distributions.

Sorry, I had not noticed you were the only one here allowed to spout random unsourced numbers to back your claims.

You are of course free to believe what you want.

I was essentially saying that there is that issue you mentioned, of course, just that for my money things are better now than they were, that the differences are not as acute in most cases, unlike in days of yore, where there could be and was huge differences. Gaming PCs are now better than ever ... they call it progress.

And as they say, the facts speak for themselves.

I'm not patching these games, I just want to have a repository of offline installers. You know, to utilize one of the basic ideas of GOG - when you buy a game, it's yours. When you have it downloaded, that is. I already own plenty of files that have been removed from GOG along the way, so that's an additional bonus.

The problem would be easily solved by always updating game installers with latest patches and not naming language packs, DLCs, texture packs and what not a "patch" - this way, you can also keep separate patches for people to save on bandwidth if they want them, and I would actually not care about the versioning and file naming mess anymore, I would just download the latest installer (and addons, if any).

I actually put some thought into that number, given Steam's market share and GOG's claims about Galaxy usage. Good to know you admit to spouting random numbers...makes anything you say basically worthless, however.