After some of its users found that password-protected RAR archives located inside some of the game installers they used were making it difficult to impossible to install and play their games properly, GOG has announced that it will remove them.
The issue first surfaced in November of last year, although it picked up steam just last month as more users found they were having problems, most of those users of Linux-based operating systems. Seems that the tools used previously were no longer able to handle the archives and rightfully a few people were annoyed.
GOG explained that the passwords had been added to around 30 games with large install files as a method to prevent less tech-savvy users from breaking games by not installing them properly through the installer provided, but admitted that due to the feedback from the more advanced users they had just caused a whole new issue entirely.
"We’ve heard your concerns regarding this solution and we do agree it could have been better. Although the same could probably be said about many other answers to this problem, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do better for our community," the team wrote. "To that end we will be removing the mentioned archive protection from the select Windows installers that had it until a better solution, both technically and philosophically, is ready."
They did warn however that because of their goal to offer hassle-free and user-friendly experiences for all the installers could not be guaranteed to stay the same and thus some incompatibility with unsupported third-party programs was to be expected, although it had not been their goal to purposefully break it this time.