Aye, but i don't see why that couldn't have been solved by selling a small number of copies instead, or putting a time limit on the remaining titles.
And it doesn't justify at all not warning people beforehand. They made their previous announcement into false advertising, period.

I think you misunderstood me. People missing out on deals due to the abrupt ending is in no way a small thing, and I'm not dismissing it. What I'm saying on top of that is that even if zero people had missed out on anything, concluding the promo the way GOG did would still be wrong. IMHO, this is indicative of a bigger problem with GOG, and also worth mentioning and discussing.

You might wish to investigate what false advertising actually is, before you accuse GOG of engaging in it.

They have the right to end a promotion that is running too long and disrupting their scheduled site activities, just as I have the right to end a conversation if I don't want to be having it any more, or to stop engaging in an activity that I am finding boring or onerous. And I'm glad they did. Did they offer their goods, as advertised, with adequate time for people to buy them? Yes, they did. They did not continue the sale into a second WEEK, after it was anticipated to run approximately four days, and good on them.

It's times like this that I miss TeT. He would have been here with an honest answer in the good ol' days. Or, at least, that's how I remember it would be... Sometimes you're just not sure if you're wearing rose colored glasses or not.

None of the titles were labelled "final chance" as they had been in the prior Insomnia sales; looking back that makes me wonder if GOG always intended to abruptly pull the plug so wouldn't have been able to indicate which round/item was a "final chance" or not.

I think the main reason why the old games sold faster than the new ones is that the majority of them was cheaper and the discounts were higher. 8-15 Euro isn't as tempting as 1-3 Euros, for example, especially if it's about games you just want to try or collect and you're not sure whether you'll like them. Of course, another factor might be that the newer games aren't always complete yet (season pass, extras DLCs instead of included add-ons etc.), that they have higher system requirements and that some of them have already been bundled a few times or discounted on other stores (which doesn't happen to DRM-free classics that often, as hardly anyone but GOG sells them or puts them in bundles).

Yup... Many people will buy lots of 1-3 Euro games just because they're cheap. 8 Euro is far beyond this impulse buy price range already and 15 Euro is a price tag where you have to be really interested in a game.

Next Insomnia, add a time limit. 200 copies or 2 hours max. Shouldn't be too hard to add a little countdown above the current deal, just as it is already done during the huge sales.

Also they never claimed there would be 3 rounds anyway, even though prior Insomnia sales had 3 rounds. Assumptions, assumptions! :) Seriously though it really doesn't matter in the end because whether they ran it for one week with 3 rounds or 3 weeks with 9 rounds, 10 minutes after it would end there would start coming in people who missed out because of all sorts of personal reasons... "I just found out about the sale yesterday" or "I just got back from vacation from Antarctica where we didn't have Internet access!" or "I just woke from a coma!" or <insert $personal_reason here>

Heck, that'd be true if GOG advertised the promo every 5 minutes on all social media and sent out email notifications once an hour. Someone somewhere would be "busy" and not see it or not be able to be here for one reason or another. Much like the guy who was waiting for Bards Tale or whatever it was to go on sale but went to bed, then woke up like 10 minutes after it just finished being on promo for like 4 hours or whatever... Sometimes these things just happen and it's not the end of the world really. :) There is always a sale another day. I've missed out on things in the past too and was a little bummed out but eventually another sale comes and you get another chance, maybe even cheaper! :)

More LA releases this week confirmed. :P

But thank you for the update, much appreciated.

Very unfortunately though GOG is ran by humans and not robots, so they miscalculate and make mistakes much like all of us do. Is it intentional? I would make the assumption that it almost certainly is not, and that they work very hard to try to ensure the smoothest customer experience that they possibly can, but being human invariably mistakes do get made. They do a lot of hard work and have to endure pretty much non-stop negative comments somewhere or another in the forums, support, etc. which is unfortunate considering how great of a company they really are.

I'd like to thank GOG for their hard work and efforts, and for putting together these great promos every few months even if I don't always like every aspect or detail of how the promo works, and even if they make human errors in their web code, their email or other communications or other mistakes. I think they deserve and would like to give them a pat on the back for that so without further adieu...

GOG: Thank you very much for all that you do for DRM-free gaming, and for providing us with these great opportunities to pick up games for great prices, and even moreso for having bytesex with Disney and bringing us LucasArts Star Wars games! Woohoo! :)

Thanks for the info, and looking forward to the next bit of excitement from GOG. :)

To be honest, it is people being upset and unforgiving why companies over time give out less and less information to customers, so as to never end up being wrong accidentally and having people lynch mob them over the Internet when they had only good intentions all along. The lesson learned from being lynch mobbed might be to make sure that future announcements are very very terse on specifying any specific details to leave a wide wide berth of room for human error. The next Insomnia sale might be announced as:

"Crazy Unpredictable Insomnia!!!!!"

"This incarnation of the Insomnia sale is crazy! It's zany! Our engineers went mad and just threw up games without counting them, and we have no idea how many repeats there will be, how many days it will last, whether or not there will be free gifts or not, heck we have no idea what's going to happen! Anything could happen, or nothing could happen! There might not even be a promo, or maybe there will be, who is to say because... we're crazy!"


That would pretty much cover them on every angle I think.

I do like the sound of that.

It would have been a better solution to just half the amounts of copies sold in round three, or announce that it will end after round two, or something like that. It's not very customer-friendly to encourage people to stay up all night waiting for their games to show up and then change the rules all of a sudden and just cancel the promo without warning.

Maybe they should have done that, instead of creating false hopes.