Hours to a single is plenty of time to decide if you want to buy something.

As for the matter of work/life/pets/children, I'm not entirely sure how you're not able to scrounge together a 5 minute break from your cashflow/'social obligations'/16 dogs/parasites to snag a purchase, unless you're really just that bad at typing.

Not to mention that not all the sales are going to be flash sales; there's 13 pages of offers on the ever useful browsing pages.

nvm

Indeed. I didn't expect any repeats so soon.

Some people who downvoted probably really were clueless. Steam pretty much said, based on their data, flash sales were detrimental for every parties. Flash only appeased active customers who sit pretty much in front of their PC. Flash didn't even cater to casual steam users and it deterred them from purchasing since they waited for the right sale.

Flash Sales sucked, deal with it.

I'm actually interested in this, do you happen to remember the announcement from STEAM where they said that? It would be interesting if they provided some statistical data. I love gathering concrete stats, so that in the future, should I need to, I can backup the things I say. :)

Yeah, i'm still waiting to see how this is anti-consumer, especially in the face of not even doing a sale.

Overall, i do agree that it's annoying, and you can miss out on sweet deals, but that's not really unfair or anything. You (in the third person, not you in particular) can miss deals all the time, and you can't say it's not fair because you didn't know site X was having a sale or something. I'm sure you missed out on a bunch of really awesome deals that happened before you started shopping at GOG. Is that unfair, too, simply because you didn't know GOG was a thing? No, the expectation to catering to you is unfair.

But, yes, I do find it annoying. It makes the site slower, but I'll never argue with putting games on sale. My girlfriend is anxiously awaiting when i finally install Huniepop on her computer. I sure as heck would not have paid full price, especially when she doesn't play much of anything else she claims to get excited for. Why does anyone throw a fit when there's a sale going on? Stuff's cheaper than full price. No one's making you watch for the deals: that's your choice. You're free to not participate, and pay the full price for games, but quit whining and ruining it for others who are now happy, like me.

They wrote extensive analysis which was leaked here: https://steamdb.info/forum/790/steam-winter-sale-recap-by-valve/


https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-winter-sale-with-no-dailyflash-sales-was-big/1100-6433732/

By that logic, you can't have ketchup on food products, either. Or, rather, you can't advertise food at all, since it triggers our need to eat. Even talking about food commercials is making me hungry.

No, gog has anti-consumer practices, but this is not one of them.

Thank you! +1
Great reading material.

They've broken that promise so much. Honestly, i think it comes down to contracts with certain devs to only allow the games on sale for their sale price for so long, then when the money starts rolling in and the devs start seeing the numbers, they change their minds.

Actually, GOG has vastly reduced the amount of flash sales they do. There used to be full regular flash-sale events, but they have been all but eliminated. This leads me to think that they are getting less profitable. However, there might be other reasons behind it. Steam largely stopped their flash sales after the introduction of their refund policy. Not long after, GOG seemed to stop as well.

These current flash sales seemed designed to lure passers-bys to be purchase converts to GOG, which is a good thing as GOG could use more growth in customer size.

For sales, you don't have to worry. The discounts you see will 100% repeat again in fixed sales (non-flash). It's only a matter of when. If you haven't used Isthereanydeal.com yet, I highly advise using it to set the exact discount price you want for your specific GOG game, and just wait for the email alert to come in.

I'm honestly, glad that the flash sales are back, even in its limited state.

I am not a fan, I just don't have the time to visit GOG every hour to see what's on sale, and they certainly rely on impulse buying. But the discounts are good, the few I have compared are the cheapest price for those games ever on GOG, so if someone gets a bargain, good for them.

What I don't appreciate is getting an email at 2 a.m. because something in my wishlist went on a flash sale.

GOG's lottery-style-gambling sales are a lot more anti-consumer than flash sales, but I don't recall people making a thread like this one about them.

Not sure why Steam is being cited as if it's a legitimate authority about this subject. Steam itself is anti-consumer by trying conditionally to rent games to customers who in exchange for that same money should be owning those games unconditionally.