... this excellent Valve promotion program, yeah.

Makes complete sense.

They get no money from the purchase (Steam does), but are expected to pay maintenance costs for it (at least server/bandwidth and perhaps the occasional support ticket)?

That only makes sense as a temporary lost leader to promote their store, not a permanent sensible arrangement.

Stores and game devs/publishers are separate entities. Common sense dictates that each actor in the chain needs to be paid for services rendered.

You paid the game's publisher/dev and you paid Steam, but you didn't pay GOG (represented by its cut on the sale) for its services.

I think "free loader" in an exaggeration given that this was something that GOG provided and promoted, probably as a lost leader to get people more invested in the store, but I wouldn't expect lost leaders to be customer rights (as it is not sustainable). It is just something that is temporarily offered at the whims of marketing people to get more would-be customers interested.

I gotta admit, in spite of everything I always had and still kind of maintain some hope that it will be run again one day, though I will say this looks bad for that possibility.

Let's zoom out a little bit. I've paid gog with user experience / telemetry of sorts among other things by linking my steam account in alone (probably until the end of days), since I don't think it got unlinked after Connect bellied up. That said I don't mind it personally, esp. if it helps gog's team to improve the store in any way, so they can analyze which games I buy, when, where and likely why too. Seems like a fair deal to me, got me even more invested here over the years as a bonus.

I came here to post this. Today my URL monitoring service just reported a 'HUGE CHANGE' on the gog.com/connect URL and... it's the main page.

So yeah, scrubbed from existence.

But GOG would pay the publisher/dev, right? So if you look at it like a unique (and specifically targeted) version of a giveaway, it wasn't so bad. In fact that's pretty much how it worked - the games on offer weren't available for redemption long-term.

It was OK while it lasted, but given how long it's been since it was used last (Galaxy 2.0 sorta was the death-knell) I'm not surprised they finally shut it completely down.

Like they promised with GOGmixes?

Funny you mention those.

Weekend Sale: GOG MIX with titles up to 85% off!

It's like they are mocking us.

This is not about you if you have already purchased those video games from gog.com or from Steam, before GOG Connect ever existed.

This is about the PC video gamers who use Steam only and the day gog.com announced GOG Connect they started purchasing the video games offered on gog.com from Steam, like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games only to claim a free copy on gog.com. You can read about it some where here I even made a topic about it the day gog.com announced GOG Connect.

Steam PC video gamers were free loading.

GOG Connect was a loss of money for gog.com, because of those Steam PC video gamers.

I know it's not free, but to me GOG keys from Amazon Prime is sort of a successor (like Dishonored 2, The Evil Within 2, and Beat Cop "Prime" keys this month). And it doesn't encourage purchasing from GOG's largest competitor to get the game here.

Sad news, but it was good while it lasted. It helped me build my GOG library up here quite a bit!

I don't think GOG Connect ever really qualified as being "alive" in the first place. For the most part, it was always dead even while it was supposedly "alive."

Welcome to years ago.