hedwards: They were a pretty resounding fuck you to people who have jobs, especially that first one where the only games I might have been interested in were at the very start of the promo when any reasonable person would have still been in bed.
PixelBoy: 1) Not all people have jobs during the office hours
2) Not all places have the same time of day
3) Not everyone is interested in same games.
You should think that as a giveaway where there are a limited number of items, rather than a normal promo.
I think that's a fun idea, even if there are some games that I will miss because of not being able to stare GOG homesite 24/7.
It's really not a fun idea, it's exploitative and a massive kissoff to people who have to work.
This wasn't a giveaway, this was an opportunity to buy something. I'm not sure why you'd think that somehow they're being generous by letting people stay up all night and skip work on the chance that they'll be able to buy something at a discount.
Of course not everyone is interested in the same games, which is a huge part of the sale. Literally the only games I might have bought during that first sale went on sale before I woke up the first day. The rest of the ones were etiher ones I had or ones that I had no interest in. And there was no re-cap sale at the end for people to catch up on the ones that they missed.
It was a poorly designed and conceived of sale and I went a period afterwards where I wasn't buying any games here because of how exploitative the sale was. There was a time when the quirky sales were fun, but that particular ship departed years ago.
AB2012: I never understood the appeal of them. People who have jobs, a life, etc, end up spending less whilst GOG doesn't earn that much more from everyone else to make up for that. Everything else about them just seems like an artifical time-gated restriction which defeats the whole purpose of a sale (you lower margins in order to make more on volume, not lower them then kill off that volume by locking your customers out of your store for 5hrs 50mins out of every 6hrs...)
I'm guessing this is why it's been so long since they did one of these. There are clearly people who liked the idea, but were there really enough of them buying enough games to make up for the folks who were either frozen out or who wound up not buying things for weeks afterwards out of spite?
Since it's been a while, I'm guessing that it wasn't a particularly successful promo in terms of actually making money when compared with other promos they've done.
It's like those asinine giveaways they were doing where by the time the free game was shown, you'd have to have already clicked on it in order to get it. Even clicking before it was revealed wasn't enough. That one seriously pissed me off having such a short period of time in which to compete where literally being in the wrong region would make it effectively impossible to get a copy.