I always thought that Deal Of The Day was reserved for games with a special, lower than normal discount for a day, but supposedly not.

Take METAL GEAR SOLID. It is listed today, even though it is showing the same alternate (discount) price it always has every month or so.

I've never seen it below $10.19 AUD, for years now.
Certainly if it had ever been a couple of dollars less than that I would have bought it already. Just one of those games here at GOG, that never seem to get a true discount.

I hope this doesn't mean the game is going up in price, above $14.50 AUD ... or worse, leaving the store.
Not unless that means that future discounts will be greater than 30%, and ultimately cheaper than $10.19 AUD.

Nope.
"Deal of the Day" simply means, that - on this day - this arbitrarily chosen game (or several thereof) got chosen to be the "deal of the Day".
Has nothing to do with discounts.

Sadly not. The deal-of-the-day requires double- and triple-checking like almost everything else on GOG.

Anno 1602 was deal-of-the-day just two days ago (July 10/11th) with a -50% subpar discount.
Now it's discounted again (as part of the Vive La France sale), but this time with the regular -75%.
(For reference: gogdb price history)

It's a common sales tactic to confuse people and GOG's pretty good at it.

Same was true of the last "We brought back Insomnia!" sale where most discounts were the same as any other regular sale. I'm fairly sure a lot of that is the publishers set the price (and they do when adding the game to the store), but than after that some rarely seem to go back and update a lower price / higher maximum permitted discount after year 1, leaving them 'stuck' priced as if they were just launched, years later. See Terminator Resistance, A Hat In Time, etc. And GOG can't force a lower price below what the publishers have set (and maybe forgotten about).

It seems very random, though occasionally there are legit good deals. I remember buying Heroes Chronicles and Lula at all time low from DotD, so I usually remember to glance at them once in a while.

I think most special deals on GoG are quite underwhelming when it feels like almost every month the whole library goes on sale, usually with okay to good discounts. Similar with those emailed deals, i think i checked out a couple before deciding that it really was nothing special.

For the oldies, they would do better to create a nice package or throw in a nice little surprise (a map, a soundfile, a memory blablabla) before calling something a 'deal' *with taking a years and years of sales into account.

Maybe for the newer customers or people who don't find themselves with access towards knowledge of a broad spectrum of games, be it new or existing, something like a 'deal of the day' might still work though, and of course the idea that somewhere someone is always searching and willing to pay a certain price

personally, discounts are certainly no absolute in determining when i buy something

Seriously, are there old and regular GOG users who haven't noticed that "deal of the day", newsletter and even "all the time best discounts" are no longer the best deals for several years?
They were and still are worth noting, like the recent newsletter discount for Encodya, but for the most part, they're just marketing junk now.

I already bought that for the same price... wow, last year actually. Along with Battlezone and Mirror's Edge. Granted I paid $6.99 in Ameribux, which is above my usual threshold for old games, but I got suckered into buying it because I never played the first and wanted to see THE LEGEND itself. I say, 14 months later and having not installed it.

So your complaint is that MGS is not discounted deep enough with "deal of the day", not that it isn't discounted at all?

Just clarifying that because I see MGS being discounted with -30% (6.99€ for me after the discount)... so I am unsure why it shouldn't be marked as a "deal of the day"? As long as it is discounted, right?

If there are deals of the day which have a 0% discount, then I'd shrug my shoulders and be like:

"Huh? That's odd, is it a glitch or why did they name a game with no discount as a "deal" (of the day)? Oh well, moving on..."


EDIT: Somehow I feel people are just overthinking this.

If I see a game I want with an agreeable price, I buy it.

I don't care if Chinese can get it much cheaper than me, or whether Steam is selling it for even less, or whether the discount is -90% or no discount at all. If I feel the price is "low enough" for that particular game, I buy it.

Having a deep discount (like over -60%) is a good way to get my initial attention, but even then I might find the price not agreeable, e.g. feeling the default price is just inflated, and they are not expecting anyone to buy it with the default price anyway. Like certain JRPGs where the "ultimate edition" costs something like 150€.

Or alternatively, the base game might be -90%, but then it has dozens of small game play content DLCs which are not discounted or discounted with -10%. Then I might also feel that nah, I'll pass buying the game, at least for now.

Well until now mostly, I always thought of it as showing the best deals in the latest sale. So some kind of significant discount.

And it is hard not read something out of the following.

Deal of the Day
Act fast before those deals are gone for good!

For me, that gives a kind of sense of the once off, or the last hoorah.
Like the last chance to take advantage of a great deal ... only as we can see, it isn't that great in some cases, perhaps many. Yep, certainly seems to be so.

For sure, it would be the game provider dictating the price.
However, GOG have a number of games only available at GOG, that have been on my wishlist for ages, waiting for a true discount.

But aside from that, surely GOG determine what games are promoted as game of the day. And sometimes the games are at a special discount, so they are playing games with the prices clearly, that smells of trickery ... some pretense going on.

P.S. I guess you could also say that there is more than one type of abandonment of games here ... a completed game, left here to rot almost, with no real change of price. The game is left here to show a presence, but the provider doesn't really care beyond that. Yep, I have certainly bought a good number of games that were deal of the day, and a cheaper than usual price.

Hence why I started this thread, because one game in particular that I often check the price of, became Deal Of The Day, and it wasn't discounted any more than normal. That stood out and made me question the whole Deal Of The Day thing.

For sure, which is why I occasionally comment about a game's other alternate price, because it is on sale that often at that price, and the non discount price just seems like it is there to make the alternate price look like a discount, when it isn't really. For me, it has always been about price, a fair price. That often means a so called discount, but I have grabbed a number of games that weren't discounted, because the price was good enough anyway.

To me it seems there is a lot of artificial pricing going on, for the sake of pretend discounts, which could well explain why GOG have so many sales, a huge number of sales. Yep, I have commented a few times about the rise of prices in the last couple of years. The base price has gone up, and then sometimes the discount percentage has as well, but when you compare the end result, the games are more expensive. So going by percentage alone, you could think they are a better price now, when they aren't really. And then sometimes it is the same discount percentage, and we are a few dollars worse off.

All that said, there are as you say, the occasional great bargain to still be had ... a true discount.

I certainly still manage to buy games at GOG regularly.

If you read what I wrote, I said it was its other (alternate) price, so to my mind not a true discount, and now it is featured as Deal Of The Day at that pretend discount. Nope, there are regular sales on all the time at GOG, and Deal Of The Day is a special highlight, which to me means it should be reserved for the best discounts. I don't see how what I questioned is over-thinking at all. Deal Of The Day meant a special discount to me, end-of-story.

And neither do I care what others pay for a game, other than they are happy to pay too much and it keeps the price high. For me it has always been about a fair price, and a game doesn't even have to be discounted to qualify.

And I say all that as someone who has spent a lot of money at GOG buying many games ... over 2100 entries now in my GOG library. So I feel I have a pretty good gauge on what is the true value or fair price for a game. I'm also an older guy who has been buying games for many decades. And unlike many folk it seems, I don't impulse buy, letting my emotions rule me. I stick to being sensible, despite the urges I often get.

It used to be the highest discount ever for the games listed in it. Way back then. Now it mostly seems to just serve as a perceived FOMO machine.