... 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.

Aye, noticed that the button was gone in the footer. I wonder now whether gog unlinked those steam accounts now or gog is still getting data from it. Not that I personally mind in my own case, but it's weird to not say anything about it, despite we all knew it was technically dead for a long time.


I'm not getting those steam games free to begin with, let alone care what others did or didn't claim during those promos. But hey, if you've lost some sleep over the Connect in years past, good for you now I guess. All's well that ends well.

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.

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.