I use primarily linux so GOG galaxy is mostly not an option for me, downloading games from GOG web takes forever, it never goes over 6 or 7 MB/s. but when I download things from steam it goes at 89 MB/s at a minimum, downloading from GOG Galaxy in a windows platform is also much faster than from the GOG web. Why is this happening, I love having offline installers for all of my games and I am a loyal GOG customer, I have bought over 1200 games from gog alone.

Do you mean Mbits/sec or MBytes/sec? Big difference there, and it is especially important to pay attention to that because web browsers, and IIRC Galaxy, report the download speeds as MBytes/sec, while Steam reports them as Mbits/sec. So make sure you compare apples to apples.

Anyway, yes, many people have reported quite slow download speeds with web browsers, and some also with Galaxy. No clear reason is found. I seem to have quite ok download speeds, Galaxy pretty much maxes out my internet line at about 70 MBytes/sec, while with a web browser I get something like 38 Mbytes/sec right now (downloading two offline installer files at the same time) which is plenty fast for me.

XXX

That's a bad comparison, because you can't download Steam games using a web browser. I don't see anyone complaining that Galaxy is slower than Steam, just that web browsers are slower than Galaxy. As far as that goes, it depends where you are, and things can change. I used to get better download speeds with Galaxy, however I downloaded a large game using a browser the other day, and it went about as fast as Galaxy.

XXX

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/website_throttling_download_speed

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_browser_download_server_list_fastly_cdn

You can't download from Steam or Epic using a web browser anyway. The topic here is web browser download speeds, not client download speeds. The OP is not using Galaxy. OK, so there's one person who complains about Galaxy speeds, which has to do with your location, as none of that happens here at all. It 100% saturates my 300Mbps bandwidth and doesn't fluctuate. Not sure if you understand that GOG doesn't host the games themselves, they use CDNs (not just one; Galaxy and web browser downloads use different ones, or they did last time I checked). So it depends on the CDN in your location.

XXX

They use third-party CDNs; this is a fact which not up for debate. You can see for yourself which one they use for you, it's not hard. Some examples are Fastly (usually for browser downloads), Highwinds, Akamai, and others. And they do not have slower downloads than Steam, as I showed you; other people have reported similar results. If you personally are getting slower downloads, that's an issue with the CDN in your location and not as simple as "Steam servers better durrrrrrr". The content doesn't exist in just one place, but is distributed to different servers around the planet, so ideally you'd be downloading from somewhere near you. So maybe don't comment then.

dont forget routing also plays a huge role. start at your isp.

XXX

Maybe, but the speeds are not universally slow to everyone. For instance, I get faster speeds downloading offline installers with Galaxy, than I get downloading a game with the Steam client. And the web browser downloads with GOG are also fast enough for me, even if they are at the moment about half of what I'd get with Galaxy.

Hence, I suspect there is something else there as well, at least for those poor GOG users who get abysmal download speeds like a few MBytes/sec or even less (some have reported like 500 kBytes/sec download speeds which is obviously useless), maybe some kind of routing issue where they get routed to non-optimal servers in a galaxy far far away...

People are different of course, but if I achieve 10+ MBytes/sec download speeds, I am happy, even though in theory I could have up to around 70-75 MBytes/sec download speeds. I don't think Steam ever maxxes out my 600 Mbit/sec (= 75 MBytes/sec) internet line either, and that is quite fine to me, I am not really expecting that,

Steam and Epic in your case connects to the very same Fastly CDN as when you download a GOG game with a browser?

Somehow, I highly suspect that. Or maybe you meant to say "ISP" instead of "CDN"?

XXX

I think some have reported about that as well, but generally more complaints, at least about very poor download speeds, seem to indeed come from web browser downloads.

It also muddles the discussion that some are complaining that their 1Gbit/s is not maxxed out by GOG/Galaxy but they get "only" e.g. 200MBits/sec (= 25 MBytes/sec) or 100MBits/sec (=12.5 MBytes/sec) download speeds, while some are reporting actually very poor, useless, download speeds, like only 1 MBytes/sec or even less.

Also, it did occur to me now that Steam is reporting the download speeds as Mbits/sec while web browsers and IIRC Galaxy report them as MBytes/sec. I wonder if that may confuse some people as well when they are making speed comparisons between GOG/Galaxy and Steam?

For instance, I am still unsure if the OP in this thread is referring to MBytes or Mbits, or even both?

(1 MByte = 8 Mbit)

Who is this "we"? All GOG users, or is it more like a "royal we" as Jeffrey Lebowski puts it so eloquently?

In case you didn't know, you can also download GOG offline installers with a web browser, without the use of the Galaxy client. That is what the OP in this thread is talking about.

Here are my test results (not recent, but long after these issues were being reported already, and I haven't seen it go worse since then). As you can see, for me Steam was considerably slower than Galaxy or the other gaming clients, but I still consider Steam "fast enough" as well:

Download speeds:

GOG offline installer with the Edge browser: (Biomutant) 24 MBytes/s (yesterday I actually got a better download speed, around 38 MBytes/s; this seems to vary somewhat, probably based on busy hours, maybe even which game you are downloading)

GOG Galaxy offline installer download: (Biomutant) 70 MBytes/s

GOG Galaxy: (Biomutant) maybe 55 MBytes/s on the average (fluctuated a lot between 20-65 MBytes/s, sometimes stabilizing for a longer time to 55 or so)

Steam: (Resident Evil 5) 37 MBytes/s on the average (peak: 40 Mbytes/s)

Epic Games Store: (GTA V) 70 MBytes/s on the average

Ubisoft Connect: (Watch Dogs) 60 MBytes/s on the average

EA: (Dead Space 3) 69 MBytes/s