karnak1: I've been looking to buy
Rise of the Dragon and
Heart of China for a long time now. But only 20% discount for 30 year old games?!
Greedy Activision bastards! I imagine that, if Call of Duty games were being sold here, we'd never get more than a 30% discount on them. Must be the "DRM-free tax" or something :P
timppu: Oh come on. The base price is little over 5€, and you expect them to give some high discounts on that?
That may be the reason GOG or the publishers are unwilling to bring many oldies to the store: people are simply not willing to pay for the games.
(I'm probably not saying anything below you aren't already familiar with tbh :p)
I do think there's something to be said for the deep "instabuy" price (like a candy bar at a checkout line where you might not think too much about buying it) where somebody might not be super-enthused about it but will grab it just to try it out. For old games especially that price is, to me, probably around
$3 or less. Some of these Activision games have been here long enough to be deserving of deeper discounts imo. Maybe GOG should try to convince the Activision suits to give some of the worse-selling Activ games here discounts of at least %50 off, or maybe do more bundle discounts that are deep but require you to buy a bundle of games
(70% off for a bundle of adventure games not in a series, like 10 games for ~$20).
Your second paragraph may also be true depending on the oldies - how high is it on the wishlist or how well did it sell "back in the day", and has it already been on Steam, stuff like that. GOG
seems to have been rejecting old stuff that may be obscure,
but (and I know some people don't like the wishlist) from what I've seen they've been pretty good about bringing stuff that has at least a few hundred wishlist votes. The batch of Activision games after the "Activision drought/gap" were all ones that had at least a few hundred wishlist votes - Freddy Pharkas, Willy Beamish, Soldier of Fortune, Shivers, Heart of China, Throne of Darkness, etc. - and several had close to or over 1k.
(VTM Bloodlines and SWAT 4 came after the drought and have since shot to the front page bestselling all-time.)