Posted December 21, 2012
The much more likely explanation (imho) is that pricing is actually a pretty complex task. GamersGate has a catalog of nearly 5,000 games. These have different prices in dozens of different regions in the world. GamersGate also accepts several different currencies. Then there are constantly sales going on, and often several sales overlap each other. Finally, take into account that selling games is an extremely competitive business in which most companies can't afford the time and manpower to double- and triple-check their actions. It doesn't surprise me that such an environment creates mistakes.
GamersGate isn't the only company affected, either. We just had a rather spectacular case with Gameftop (or was it Gamefly?) selling FarCry 3 for under 7$, a fraction of its worth. Gamesplanet UK had several games for 100% off lately, which promptly crashed their servers until it got fixed.
We shouldn't take GOG (who make extremely few mistakes with pricing) as an example - GOG is actual an exception, because they have only a few fixed price points, accept only one currency, don't have regionally different prices, and have a smaller catalog than most other shops. With regard to susceptibility to mistakes, GOG and GamersGate are probably at the opposites ends of the spectrum. GOG lives in an environment that minimizes most causes for mistakes, GamersGate's environment is much more complex.
I also find it funny that people are on their facebook page have been saying how they have been hitting f5 for hours now...poor GG have caused there own customers to DDoS them.
