With the sale approaching its end I decided to write my thoughts about it. Hopefully GOG's staff will see their customers' complaints and praises and act as needed to receive more of the latter and less of the former.

THE GOOD: Free games are always good, and Neverwinter Nights was an awesome choice. I didn't really want any of the XP-locked games, but others certainly must have liked them and the sale wasn't made only for me. I got three games I wanted at the Fall Sale just a few weeks earlier so I'm more than happy in that front. Plus the wide selection of GOGConnect'ed games is certainly nothing to scoff at.

We have never seen so many games on sale at once, so it was bound to have something for everyone (except those that already own the games that interest them, of course). A few games had pretty good discounts too. The best deals I could see were in the Daedalic bundle, so us adventure gamers had 80-95% off reasons to celebrate :-)

THE BAD: Unfortunately Daedalic's discounts were not the norm but an exception to the rule. Most bundles were very MEH, in fact some games were priced higher than you could pay for the same games, unbundled, during a regular weekend promo. Take for example Topware's bundle and assuming there's at least one game from them you don't want the best price you can get is 60% off! I'm not spending my money there, that's for sure.

Edit: eiii reminded me of the many bugs we've seen during the sale. They sure deserve a mention in this list as well.

THE UGLY: Oh boy, this promo was confusing as hell. It was nigh impossible to find whatever was being added to the sale as the days went by because the bundles didn't follow any pattern and they could appear anywhere in the front page. Unbundled games didn't fare any better either. I basically decided to restrict my everyday interaction just to check-in for XP and to buy whatever near the end. It totally killed the interest of an ongoing promo.

It was made even worse because of the Youtubers' collections, which looked like bundles, were placed together with bundles but WERE NOT bundles! They are nothing but recommendation lists which must be good for the people who know and like those youtubers but were only an hindrance to those who do not. It didn't even feature a comment of why that person liked that game. So there we were trying to find whether the games we wanted to buy had a price we were willing to pay, and the same game appears in a bundle and in one of those pseudo-bundles, each one with a price. (Admittedly we were charged the bundled lower price, but that didn't make it any less confusing. Just not a rip-off.)

To add to the confusion soup there's the fact that in this sale, like in the Fall sale, each game in a bundle has its own discount. It leads to all sorts of mathematically correct yet apparently bizarre behaviors like times where you add games and you're actually saving more even tho the discount goes down; or the other way around. It's a nightmare to whoever isn't good at math.

Still, those were only presentation problems. At least they weren't a disappointing sale tactic like those three Devolver BYOB bundles (redundancy FTW!) where you need to grab every single game in the bundle and your choices are limited to getting a normal or extended edition or some DLC; in fact in one of them you MUST grab an upgrade to qualify for a BYOB discount. That's shady as hell!

(Here's a hint GOG: if you create a BYOB with 50 titles where we need to pick 49 to qualify for the BYOB discount it is NOT going to make people happy they have been given "choices". It will make them annoyed and pissed that you're pretending they have choices. And they will use their actual not-gonna-buy choice and their will-complain-to-friends-or-social-media choices as well.)

To finish this turdcake with a cherry on top there was the Interplay bundle, which was split in two so that people would have more chances to buy games they didn't really want to qualify for the BYOB discount. Not shady at all, right?

THE SILLY: every time I saw the Legend of Kyrandia series in the EA RPG bundle I twitched a little. Maybe the definition of an RPG changed and I wasn't informed?
There was also the recurring GOG problem of some bundles announcing e.g. "up to 66% off" and then you see a game 70% off inside. Oh well, I had to check inside every bundle anyway...

FINAL THOUGHTS: I actually did buy a few games indeed (barely enough to qualify for the three XP-locked games) but that is more a result of combining the meager discounts with the recently added brazilian's regional prices than the sign of a whooping sale. If I was seeing american or european prices I don't think I would buy even a single game. All things considered I was thoroughly dissappoint. Please GOG, fix the ugly stuff and try to get rid of the bad without losing the good as well.

Edit: typos, formatting, clarifications. sentences be hard. capital letters intrigue mugu as well.

I also would like to have more search features on GOG, sort by discount, sort by price, ... But thanks to you at least can use [url=http://www.an-ovel.com/cgi-bin/magog.cgi?ver=770&scp=gdspurio&dsp=ips&ord=q9p0&flt=pos~1~&opt=n]MaGog to sort (and filter) games by discount and price.

Magog helps a lot and it is much better than using Gog's plain lack-of-a-search, but it wasn't made to deal with the bundles. It simply won't consider a game's bundled price.

So, I was not the only one that saw one single Interplay Bundle getting split into two not long after, cheers.

Overall, a fairly good sum up of the sale, +1.

Apart from the freebees this sale also was one of the most disappointing ones for me. I was going to write my own summary, but you summed it up perfectly. I couldn't write it better. The only addition I have is the annoying number of bugs during this sale.

So +1 for your summary. Hopefully someone @GOG is reading it and thinks about it for future sales.

I know. But seeing how hard it is to already get the current bundle price of a game from GOG (you often have to add all the games of a bundle to your cart and check them out to get the effective price) and the access limitations GOG applies for their site this would be a very hard if not impossible task. And I'm afraid when we ever will get such search and filter functions on GOG itself they won't include the bundle prices too.

No, there is know windowed mode in the game.

That's too bad. Do you know if it runs well in Win7? Or does it have any resolution settings?

Well , i'm also not satisfied with this sale .

Still no sign of Gog Connect ( EA Origin ) .

also
Deponia 4: Deponia Doomsday only 50% off
Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition only 50% off
Forgotten Realms and Beyond Bundle only 50% off

Ah that's right, I forgot to mention the bugs. Still they're so prevalent in every sale that I would be weirded out if there were none all of a sudden.
I wouldn't even place them in the "Ugly" section, but the "Bad" instead... they grow on you after a while you know?
"It used to be a bug but today it's a feature..."

Too bad they didn't ask Mrkgnao to design those functions. If he created Magog dealing with the limitation of not having access to GOG's database imagine what he could do as a GOG employee with actual access.

They acted fast but I remember a single Interplay bundle and some comment in the forum confirmed to me that I didn't imagine it.

But even if the Interplay bundle was ugly the Devolver bundles weren't much better either. They just weren't split in front of us, but why were they even split at all? Try as I might I see no other reason than "to milk more money"

How buggy is the GOG version of UFO: Enemy Unknown?

I don't care about the mods as I'm only interested in playing the vanilla version. Currently, I'm just fed up to the teeth with playing games that necessitate research and awareness of broken gameplay elements and the know-how to fix or circumvent them.

I'm also interested in the sequel but judging by some of the reviews it sadly seems to belong to the aforementioned category...

They called it a finale 3 days ago (aka that's it, no more games). They could also call it a finale 1 hour before the sale ended, but then not everybody would notice it, right?

14960 XP / 15000 XP

I guess I need to spend 0,04$ to earn the next free game but i cant decide a good one. Eh. I dont even know why I am writing this here.

29990 XP / 30000 XP here.

>_<

Edit: Ended up buying Startopia. Sheesh. I would've gotten more but EA's refusal to add regional pricing to their old games is getting in the way.

I wonder how much money the top dog of the leader board has spent (roughly calculated) during the sale. What's his/her current exp tally? (I myself haven't opted in.)