Bought some gift codes for a friend, but I only want to send it to him every now and then and not all at once.

Do the codes have expiration dates, or can I send them whenever I want?

I think the regular gift codes that you buy with your own money don't have an expiration date; in any case I still have a valid gift code bought in 2011. The free codes you get during this sale (System Shock 2, Riddick, Banished) are only valid until Dec 15.

Unfortunately, sometimes games get removed from the GOG catalogue due to license issues, but those games stay accessible for those who already own it. I'm not sure how that affects gift codes, but I think they'd remain vaild, too, at least in most cases. If some extras like the soundtrack get removed though and the user didn't get a chance to download them before that, they will be missing in the gifted version, too. Not that these things happen a lot, but they do happen once in a while.

Oh, and you can test the validity of your codes yourself, without redeeming them. Just go to the redeem page, insert your code and it will show the expiration date (ideally "NEVER"). Then press "cancel". (The description is a bit ambiguous, but don't worry. Checking out what's on the code does not render it "used", only "in use" for a certain time, until you cancel the process. You'd still need to confirm that you actually want to redeem it, before the code is "used".)

Leroux covered you pretty well. Only thing to add is that there are 2 kind of codes GOG accepts, gift codes and bonus codes. Gift codes are what you get when you buy something as a gift, while bonus codes are codes provided by GOG themselves. Gift codes are longer (20 characters), do not expire, and can be partially redeemed, while bonus codes are shorter, expire, and you can't partially redeem them. Bonus codes are usually found from promotions (NVIDIA Witcher one, GOG sales) or from developers (Kickstarter rewards, bundles).

Since you did buy them, they shouldn't expire.

It pays off to read the accompanying e-mail you get with your gift code "purchase". Freebies during promos often have an expiration date now, so that users can't hoard them and make a business out of selling or trading stuff they got for free, when the demand rises again.

In a nutshell:
_Codes bought normally through the checkout will never expire. And can be still redeemed even if the game is removed from GOG.
_Codes received for free in a promotion might expire. You can check the expiration on the redeem page as Leroux mentioned:
https://www.gog.com/redeem

Yeah, people knew about that, it expired last Christmas (or around that time) and people were warning folks about it in the forums. But if you gifted the bonus code to someone, it got 'extended', so if you've got a bonus code you're not sure if you want to use yourself or gift it, you can gift it to yourself and then later on decide when you know. :)

So if I don't like the time it takes for a code to expire, I can just gift it to myself, then make it a gift again and it'll stick on my person?

But yeah, I assumed he had activated the code all along. Up until it was too late.

Yeah, or rather - once you get the bonus code, just send it as a gift to yourself and that's it, because you can't re-gift it again, unless I'm mistaken.

This is interesting, I hope the Witcher 2-thing was once in a lifetime and that normal gift codes don't expire as you kind people say.

Witcher 2 wasn't a gift code, but a bonus code. Same as the freebies from this sale.

I think that happened more recently. I think the Fallout games were the first time I heard about expiring gift codes. It may have been something they could do previously, but that's the first I heard of it.

I can address this bit. I received a gift code for Fallout 1 long after it was originally removed from the catalog and a while before it was re-added. It was redeemed without issue.

EDIT: Especially since it's under hedwards remark about the Fallout freebie codes that wound up invalid - it was a regular gift bought with regular cash before the removal.

hello ,
i bought a game from eneba and when i’m going to redeem it tells me "code expire on ..." when it expires, the game is removed ?

It means the code will expire after that date and you can no longer use it. After you successfully activated the code the game will stay in your library forever.