Hi, I'm not sure if this is of interest to anyone else, but I submitted my first feature wishlist to the community, and I'd like to open discussion to see if anyone might perhaps have any feedback.

Thank you in advance to anyone who replies or votes on my wishlist, it's much appreciated :)

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/automatic_game_buying_fund

I'd like the ability to pay money to my own wallet on GOG that could be used for automatic buying of games that meet a certain criteria, any game between a certain release date that goes on sale in a certain price range that isn't in my library already.

For example, any game that was released before the year 2000, and is on sale for less than £1 GBP, if that game is not in my library, I'd like my wallet to automatically buy that game on my behalf, and I accept the risk that I may not like the game.

Why am I asking for this feature?, I'd like to continue to show my support for GOG, and any older games that are released on the platform, but sometimes I'm not available to visit GOG.com and can miss sales, so if their was a way to automatically make purchases on my behalf that meet a certain criteria as mentioned above, I'd be more than happy to put money in my own GOG wallet.

Could you fill my wallet and that way I could help you?:)

A problem with something like this is that it's going to lead to an increased percentage of refunds because people either forget they set it, already made a purchase elsewhere (admittedly less of an issue on GOG), or regret their purchase because they had already deemed it not that interesting to buy anymore etc.

Though this could be somewhat mitigated with a clear statement that the games *can* be refunded but only back to the wallet, and it should likely at the very least need some kind of automated refund system, which means it'll take more effort to implement, making it less likely to happen 'soon', but I imagine that sort of thing would become a requirement eventually anyway if they'd keep growing.

For the store itself, I don't think this is a particularly attractive deal as they want to draw traffic to the sales for incidental purchases. While that might be countered with 'guaranteed' purchases of the games that are on the autobuy wishlist it also guarantees they'll only be sold at the lowest sales price while, if you miss the sales there are still chances you'll buy at a higher price point because you might want to play the game before the next deep sale.

So for the store it's guaranteed low price purchases vs low-mid priced purchases with an increased chance of buying additional games.

Also, from what I remember, while wallets are nice, there's a limit to what some stores are willing to handle since wallet is essentially 'debt' the store carries and they don't want that to grow out of control. (don't think this is an issue GOG would be worrying about any time soon though)

Before GOG or any other store considers adding any new feature to their platform they have to consider who is going to actually use it and what the pros and cons are, whether it is niche etc. I would say that a feature like this would be very niche and have a lot of room for people ending up with surprise purchases that they did not want after-the-fact for a whole host of reasons, which would cause an increase in refunds which actually cause stores to lose money in chargeback fees.

That can be avoided entirely by people making an account on https://www.isthereanydeal.com and importing their GOG game wishlist and setting any price points or discount points on notifications. They'll get email notification when GOG or any other store of their choice has the game(s) on sale at or below a given price or a given discount, and they can make their own mind up whether or not to go to the store and buy it at that time. This avoids the store from having to risk chargeback losses for a feature very few people would ever use.

With limited finite developer resources, they're much more likely going to focus their developers on making features that appeal to the largest number of consumers rather than niche features which would end up being abused by people and costing them money.

Having said that, it's good to come up with ideas and suggest them as there may be ways to combine multiple ideas and come up with something more generally usable/useful to a wider audience and potentially without any obvious cons too.

A subscription based service like Humble Monthly for example lets people buy some games in advance regularly with known pros/cons that people seem to favour and Humble seems to have made work. I'm not sure how such a feature would work at GOG or benefit us here, but it'd be less problematic likely.