Seriously, I just tried to update my 1,2k+ games repo and holy shit, what a mess.

You have tens of GB's updates of games that updates the game from year 2018 to 2021 and then have full 2024 installer.
Then you have games that are "music fix" version, only to have "audio update" patch that turns out to be five years older.
After that you have installer that are "language fix" versions, and offer patch of "d3d fix". Which one are newer? Maybe the "D3D fix" versions? Or "video fix" ones? You download all of them, but no idea which one to apply and in which order.
Following, there are files that are 2.103 patch, but regular installer is 58903 version - FML, how does that compare?
Moreover, you have games like giana_sisters_rise_of_the_owlverlord or hitman blood money that have patch that have never been incorporated into main installer - why? You seriously expect another patch to come up to justify installer rebuild after 20 or 30 years? Again, their patches that are on GOG website say "1.21 fix", then clicking it and you download "patch 543223" file that is from 2019 to your 2.304.507 from 2024 game installer. WTF.

GOG, apparently you can't handle patching. That's ok, this is no 1990's with dial-up downloads, abandon patching altogether and just recompile installers whenever games are patched. I'd rather download 20+ GB of game installer to get 100 MB update, to having to handle this garbage and swamp of files that can't be comprehended. Holy shit, this is the worst file repo I had to handle.

I agree with you that the naming scheme can look messed up, and sometimes it even is, but it's much better if you ignore that number at the end.
Other than that though, it's very rare for the installer to not be the latest version and to have a separate patch available for it, but if such a situation exists you should look into why, because it may well be that the patch is something possibly undesirable. There may be separate patches that only add support for certain languages, which if you don't want to play the game in that language would just add to the size pointlessly, especially if it also includes audio. Or there may be cases like what you pointed out, since after a very brief look on the game forums I gather that the Giana Sisters one adds a Christmas themed level as an extra, so call it a free DLC and treated as such, while that Hitman hotfix seems to cause the game to crash after the first mission, so it may fix something that happens later but you don't want it installed before starting a new game.
Otherwise, when multiple different patches are available, they tend to be displayed on the site (no idea how it is in Galaxy and I don't care, but that should handle patching on its own) with newest first.

It's not that GOG should abandon patching, but instead that they should enforce at the very least, a versioning scheme that makes some gottdamn sense.

Though, with the gratuitous addition of a patchnotes scheme that makes it impossible for them to be mislaid and vanish between the couch cushions.

Why do you have to download all the patches if you don't want them? Why not wait a year or two yourself? No one is forcing you to download them.

Wrote that post drunk, so I might have sounded a bit irritated. Sorry.
Thing is, I use automation to keep my GOG games repo up to date, as I have collection of ~1300 games already.
It would be too much hassle to look into each game separately to check if patch is needed or not. What would work best is indeed some sensible naming scheme, so that a file called patch_* is not a language DLC, etc. Also, installers should always be in the latest versions.

To give a perspective on why it matters, I removed all "patch_*_to_*" files from my repo, releasing 700+ GB of space, only to find out that for some games (like 5 or so out of 1300...) these patches are necessary to have an up to date set of installers. Mess.

Apart from the fact that I'd like to have this process automated, sometimes you just don't know if you want them. If game version is 65432, and in your GOG library you have link called "gog19 -> gog20 patch", and you download it and turns out to be "patch 2.432" file, do you need it or not? You just don't know.

I understand your irritation, but at the same time I realize that maintaining the offline installers is still second priority to GOG, over keeping the Galaxy-installed versions updated.

I'd personally prefer if GOG would completely abolish the separate patches for offline installers, and only update the main installer, every time. That would keep it all cleaner. If there is some separate "patch", then it would be there for a reason, some extra content or a very special patch that changes the game completely (which is why some might not want to have it installed).

But then many others want the opposite. They do want the separate patches for offline installers so that they don't have to reinstall the whole game to update the game, and also so that they could run some older version of the game. So yeah, we have opposite wishes then.

Try using some scripting system that depends directly on the GOG online API. I think you can automate something: I haven't tried but I bet someone has already figured out the commands for us long time ago.
I've heard about GOGdownloader (also about a mythological, yet somewhat dreadful artifact named GOGGalaxy)

Especially for new games that keep getting patches and are several tens or even over 100 GB in size for the full thing, eh? Because it's so nice and easy to download them all over again in full each time there's an update...

I've essentially given up on patches, so long as the latest full release is the same version.

Too many games don't get patches and when they do they mostly disappear too soon. Nothing worse, than gaps in your patches collection.

Ideally I'd like to only get patches, but if that can't be done decently, and it appears it can't, then I'd rather go without.

Without a doubt though, a decent patches situation would save us lots of storage space for our backups, archives, etc ... not to mention less use of bandwidth.

@OP - I doubt GOG have much say really when it comes to patches and updates, but rather it is down to the devs.

I imagine your automation regime detects an update is available for a game, and then proceeds to either download the patches (if any) or the full update. So if you should be able to easily ignore patches, except where no full update exists. That may require having a list of previous full updates on record, that gets queried. I do something like that with a database check, but I also don't do full automation, so it is part auto and part manual for me ... but then I always like to oversee things. My automation checks for updates and file names, but I decide when that happens, and whether to skip patches or not. That works well enough for me, and I have almost 2,300 entries in my GOG library.

The real issue for me lately, is too many updates for many old games. It is like GOG are using us as testers. No doubt all part of the latest game preservation thing of making sure a game works on latest Windows. But for many games these constant recent updates has gotten ridiculous in numbers.

It is because there is such a large variety of systems and hardware today. What works well on one system might not work as well on a different system, with different software installed and different hardware components. It is impossible to test for all these configurations, a developer simply wouldn't have access to them all. As a result, bugs often aren’t discovered until a piece of software or a game is released and users try it on their systems. If something specific doesn’t work for them, they report it, the issue gets fixed, and a new patch is released to prevent the same problem for others.

It was a bit different back in the days of yore, when there was less variation in systems than there is today.

I was about to mention them separately so here goes:

In my opinion, if you are going to play a game that is frequently still updated (and you want to have those updates too), just play it with a client that automatically updates the game. In this case, Galaxy.

The offline installers are more for archival purposes than for active use for such frequently updated games like in-dev games, and they are more useful for stable games that do not get updates often.

For instance, the games that I just installed yesterday from offline installers are just like that, not getting frequent updates:
Divine Divinity
Gothic 2 Gold
Demonicon
Dragon Age Origins Ultimate

Patches are actually meant for the audience who actively play a specific game, in order to fix what was told to a developer. While yes anyone is welcome to be up to date, the idea is as I mentioned. Nobody ever thought that collecting of games would be a thing, that surpass the actual playing of games. But here we are.

The best thing one can do is download a game and if you dont play it, get a full version every so often.

Otherwise, yes, you are expected to know what you are getting to attain a specific result. Solving a bug or not.

IMHO such people should use a gaming client that autoupdates the game for them, or at least makes it more convenient.

Offline installers are fine for stable games that are not receiving frequent important updates anymore. Maybe new DLCs here and there, which are still offered as separate installers as they are considered as extra content.

The current problem is that in some cases you do need the separate patches, either because the main installer is not updated to the latest version, or the "patch" is more like extra content. So usually you would be fine skipping the patch files altogether... but not quite always, unfortunately.

GOG has a bit similar problem with "Extras". Usually they are non-playable content like soundtracks or manuals, but sometimes there are other language versions or older versions of the game there, or even Linux or Mac versions of the game. Games like Broken Sword: Director's Cut, or Cyberpunk which has the older 1.63 legacy version installer in the extras.