There are countries where "online gambling" is illegal but lawmakers haven't bothered to make any distinctions between casino style gambling (blackjack, fruit machines, etc.) and things like GOG pinatas. But if they offer refunds then it doesn't really qualify as gambling because there's no actual risk involved? Maybe.

I would say that it doesn't qualify as gambling anyway. There's no risk that you lose your money. You always get a game or a gift code with a higher value than your original payment. No real risk involved (except the risk that you don't get the game you hoped for).

There's no gambling in this sale. At least not in its legal meaning. Otherwise Magic trading cards, Kinder Surprise, Lucky Bags and all kinds of other stuff would be illegal too.

I'm sure it has; it's not like it could get much worse. :P

Are you seriously suggesting that there is actually something illegal here? And about baseball card packs or any collectible card games that provides special foil cards? While every country has different laws, these laws often hinge on the specific meanings of the words and precedents in that law system. Else you'd have idiotic abuses such as claiming a gumball machine is gambling because some children value the red ones more than the green ones and you are paying a penny entry fee each time.

Frankly, it ought to be rather obvious to any reasonable person that this isn't gambling and really wouldn't be considered such in any country. Or else every "mystery game" sale would also be illegal and this type of sale has been going on for a long time. I know one of the bundle sites recently had a sale where they gave you a random game with any purchase over a certain amount.

Just because some smart asses on this forum want to claim this is akin to online gambling doesn't make it such.

Not sure if you can compare those two situations. As far as I know, Valve has very specific requirements for their refund policy. Apparently you can only play a game for a max of two hours, before you lose your rights to a refund. So I guess there's not much to gain by abusing this policy. At best you could use it as a "free" demo period for games, which is actually pretty cool.

Normally you can't abuse GOG's refund policy either, since you only get a refund if you didn't download the game, or if there's severe technical problems with the game. ( And the latter would likely involve much back and forth with GOG's support, before you eventually get your refund. Might as well just pirate the game in first place. )

But in this specific situation ( a user received a game which they have no interest in from a pinata ) I can definitely see how some would take advantage of the refund policy, and perhaps even feel like they "deserve" a refund, despite the fact that GOG never promised customers any specific game. ( Even the listing in the tracker thread isn't official -- they never promised anyone they'd have a chance to receive those specific games. )

At the end of the day, you can bet that some are taking advantage of this, to increase their chance of scoring an especially valuable game. The only question is, whether or not those are the exception or a significant portion of the pinata sales.

Ah, so it's an urban horror story after all! Well that's good to know, I always thought you get kicked back to the end of the queue but coming to think of it the support mail just says "You can reply to this e-mail to reopen the ticket." It doesn't say anything about going to the end of the queue. Anyway, thanks for the clarification.