Hi there,

Before buying a game from Insomnia, please double-check if you actually own the game first.

For whatever reason, every game, utilising Insomnia, gets a single-item bundle created. So if the regular game is "game_title", the insomnia deal will be "game_title_insomnia". Buying "game_title_insomnia" will mark both "game_title_insomnia"and "game_title" as owned, which is good, however it will NOT mark "game_title_insomnia" as owned if you already own the "game_title".

This results in the insomnia deal not being shown as owned on the front page and can bait you into rebuying a game which you already own. The GOG bundle system was always a broken mess, but at least the checkout page worked and would warn you that you're about to purchase something which you already own. Not with insomnia though. In this case you get no warning at the checkout page either. Please see the attachment for more details.

I really can't understand why it is done done the way it is. To make some internal report easier by separating normal purchases from Insomnia? Some technical limitation? Intentionally hoping someone will repurchase? I really hope it's not the latter, but in any case, GOG's bundle system is becoming progressively worse.

First I was thinking of a DB problem, but I can confirm what the OP said.

Currently there are two KKND games on the webpage

https://www.gog.com/en/game/krush_kill_n_destroy_xtreme
https://www.gog.com/en/game/krush_kill_n_destroy_xtreme_insomnia

WTF? Why create a second game entry?

I don't think it has anything to do with any kind of synchronisation.

You buy a bundle, the bundle and its contents (1 game in this case) get marked as owned.
You buy (or have previously bought) a game, but a bundle with it will not get marked as owned, regardless of time. I have all the Surge Games, all the Plague Tale games, yet their bundles remain "not owned" months later. I have dozens of examples. People were complaining about SNEG's DND bundle not being marked as owned, despite them owning everything in it already. This is "normal behaviour" for GOG.
However if I were to add any of those bundles to my cart, the checkout page will at least warn me that I already own everything in that bundle. That's not the case with these single-item insomnia bundles though.

Even if it were to fix it self some hours later, it wouldn't help us now, because the whole idea of insomnia is to have a limited 3 hour deal. I almost rebought the game I owned. Good thing I decided to double-check at the last second. Yeah, exactly. All insomnia games work this way, but the duplicates get hidden after the time runs out. All those separate entries are actually single-item bundles, which is why buying insomnia marks the real game as owned, but buying (or owning) the real game does not mark the insomnia bundle as owned, leading to accidental re-purchase.

And as i said before, unlike Steam, this is "normal" for GOG. What is not normal for GOG though, is that the checkout page doesn't warn you either this time, making this far worse.

One of the official threads has already become a thread for speculation about that, from page 3 onwards of https://www.gog.com/forum/general/summer_sale_special_start_of_insomnia_two_new_bundles_miasma_chronicles_with_40_discount_129fc/page3

This must be a new thing, because I know that in previous Insomnia sales in recent years, you specifically could not buy an Insomnia copy of the game if the game was already in your GOG library.

Myself and many others didn't like that, because we wanted to buy some gift codes with some of those Insomnia deals, but we couldn't, for the reason I just described.

Yeah, I was going to say that I don't remember seeing duplicates last time, but I wasn't sure. So instead of adding a "Buy as a gift" button on the promotional banner itself, they created single-item bundles? Good old GOG.

And now my stonefaced refusal to participate in these stupid insomniaphilliac sales is starting to pay dividends, because of course there'd be some absurd sequestered issue.

I see no law that would forbid selling more copies to one person, but they can say as seller that they only allow one copy to every customer.
It helps keeping key reseller in place.

No law forbidding sale of more than one, but it is misleading advertising to let you spend money on an item you will not receive a second copy of.

You mean that they created a second product entry? That's actually the consequence of what the other poster described.
He was NOT able to spend money for gift codes back then.

This time I agree it's a bit of a fuckup. Two products for the same game are not good in any way.

Based on what the staff said when I asked about it, it occurred to me that they did it because of the discount tracker. That's the big change we can see that would affect this. They either don't want other discounts showing on the insomnia sales, or the games are already on sale and changing the discount temporarily would affect their tracker on the original product entry, and they'd lose sales after the game was put on insomnia. Which is kind of the point of the discount tracker, to inform customers of other sales of this item on the site within the last 30 days. So to not lie, and to not have their discounts tainted, they sell a special insomnia item at the increased discount. Maybe they circumvented the law by that, but it seems like a cheat and very dishonest.

EDIT: After checking a few of the Insomnia sale games, this is the case. They are lying about the discount on the game pages and the insomnia discount is not shown in the last 30 days.

Ok, so my "consequence" was an assumption
Point is, that in the past, insomnia sales worked without that. And that was when it was not possible to buy the gift codes.

However, they are not lying, it's two different products and therefore two different price histories. Both products contain the same game, but it's still two separated products.
To separate the insomnia sales price from the originals history might in fact have been the reason why they did this.

I think having two separated products was the worst they could do to bypass the price history problem (showing the lowest price is in fact a EU law, so you blaming it on such is justified).

I didn't buy a game during the insomnia sale. Does the 'original' show as owned after doing so?
If so, then I think we are overreacting. But if not, then it is more serious, since we still don't have the chance to put certain products on ignore for good.