chandra: I appreciate sharing this idea with the community, I will forward it further but that's about all I can do.
Still, I see you thought about quite a few possible exploits and how to overcome them in your wishlist, impressive! :)
Thank you. I was trying to help. I really love the store, even with all of its possible shortcomings (nobody is perfect, sure). But contrary to someone's words below, I'm not seeking any reward as a "loyal customer", really. Just was wondering why this obvious idea wasn't implemented/discussed before?
Deadmarye: Hey, kuddos DremPSB ! At least this thread got attention, that's a very good start =)
Thanks, may be one day we'll see if the seed has been sowed well today. Speaking honestly, my birthday is about month and half from now, but I was starting it without any intention to get myself any trophy. I also don't have friends here (because I don't really believe in the friendship over the web), so I don't rely on someone's making me a gift at my birthday, apart from my family :D.
IwubCheeze: This could be an problem as GOGs prices aren't set by GOG themselves, any promotion has to be negotiated with the publisher first. Look at the Turok games for example, they have quite a few entities with rights to the IP and they all want their cut from unit sales, hence why the games are more expensive than they should be. If GOG was the only party that had a say in the price, I'm sure they would sell it cheaper.
This is kinda what makes it impractical for GOG to comb through a users wishlist and see what titles they have and contact the publisher to try and arrange a promo around an individual user. I'm not sure how big GOGs user base is but I'm willing to bet that there are hundreds of birthdays a day. Also, there also likely to be several inactive accounts too. So I wouldn't be surprised if GOG didn't do something like this because the amount of work would be immense but the gains paltry by comparison.
Ok, here is possible solution to that problem: because we may roughly conventionalize that GOG users are celebrating their birthdays in monthly batсhes, GOG system may analyze what games are marked as "most desired" in wishlists of next month's birthday persons, and then determine most frequent "birthday discount requests" and negotiate with the publishers about the discounts beforehands. I'm sure it will make easier the whole work. Also, it may be accomplished by using machines rather than human resourses (see below).
IwubCheeze: It's the reason I said if GOG ever was going to do a birthday sale sort of thing, free games based on wishlist entries should be avoided because multiple accounts could be created with one wishlist entry.
That's why I proposed some basic rules for avoiding that abuse:
● only marked as "most desired" games from wishlist are valid for birthday offer, with some possible exceptions due policy of GOG or publisher towards concrete game;
● only accounts with some minimal order history should be valid for birthday offer;
● only account with no less than 10 games in the user's wishlist marked as "most desired" should be valid for birthday offer to prevent of "sniping" the discount. If someone's wishlist is shorter than 10 games, well... in this case, that person don't have that much spend on GOG, right? So he/she don't really need an additional offer on the birthday. The user should not be able to mark more than 20 or so games in his wishlist as "most desired" to make the whole work easier and feasible for GOG. All these numbers are subjects to change by GOG, of course.
Then GOG will decide (I assume not manually, by employing its staff's worktime, but using some algorithmic limitations based on the games prices, their discount history and order history of the user) what games marked as "most desired" of the user is valid for its personal birthday offer discount and how big additional discount should be on each concrete game. The birthday offer doesn't have to feature all of the user's "most desired" games, it may be some of them plus some other games that GOG would like to promote/offer as well. GOG may have run some closed beta tests of this functional to see if this works right and there is little or no opportunity to abuse the system.
Speaking about free games on birthday, I think there may be another supplement to my initial idea: if the birthday person will purchase some games from the birthday offer (= some minimum funds were spent on it), GOG would gift him/her a random game in veins of seasonal GOG lotteries (the hats/eggs/pinatas/whatever). That's would be fair enough for GOG/the user and kind enough for a freebie on a birthday.
Nicole28: I voted on your idea! Thanks for sharing, DremPSB!
Thank you. I agree that there should be some limits established to prevent any possible abuse/cheat, in fact, I just had replied to
IwubCheeze's post just above with some similar thoughts.
InkPanther: Additionally, it's another of "long time customers should get a special treatment/offers/rewards/whatever" topics. Like we didn't get enough free stuff from GOG and nice sales during all this time we've been their customers...
No, it's not "my loyality should be rewarded" thread. By the way, most of GOG freebies that were given away over the years were purchased by me before. But I'm not complaining, in fact, it's great that GOG still do giveaways.
HeathGCF: As it's very rare that I stand at my computer, can
sitting users be included too on their birthday?
Sure, and ROFLing users should get even bigger discounts ;).