They could always give away free Witcher 3 copies. :P

Good thing this sale had nowhere near enough good deals for me to even consider this asinine "Buy 10, get 1 free" format.

They can "run out" because they mean publishers and developers don't get money for them. So they say "Okay, GOG, we'll let you give away 20 copies for free because it's a good promo. But you can't give away more because we have to pay bills and buy food and clothes and stuff..."

Yeah that makes sense, I had a feeling it was something like that. I can't stay mad at gog any way, they're my favorite game store ever!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsW9MlYu31g

I understand that people are disappointed at this turn of events, and indeed GOG could have communicated a little better that the stock of freebies was limited. Hopefully they will take that into account next time they use such a reward mechanism.

But understand this: if you were buying cheap games you weren't even interested in just to get a shot at a good freebie, you also have yourself to blame. Not only is it waste of your money - like it was pointed out earlier, why not just buy the game you want since it's part of the pool? - but I also feel like some people have abused the system to get as many freebies as they could, which deprived people who "only" bought ten games of their reward.

Yes, poor communication on GOG's part is at fault here. But so is the gambling addiction and/or greediness of some of the buyers. We are all responsible for our own wallets, and ultimately, we should strive to be smarter consumers.

I do know that a lot of people here have a sharing mentality, however. Kudos to you. :)

This.

I bought 80% of the games in this promo just to get as many free games i could. I ended up buying 5 more games yesterday and now i see that they have ran out. Had i known they'd ran out, i would have stopped exactly on the 20th game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8mduTEvnU0

I know, kind of overreacting but it feels like it. Oh well, shit happens.

I had 2 games left, and I could wait for another sale for most of my purchases. :-/

Yes, sales happen all the time.

If this is the way gog is going to treat its customers in the future, they should simply list all all games on a single page with count down counter beneath each game and when they zero the sale is over for that title.

Get rid of the sucking life away from customers to hope a game comes up one wants or does not have.

This whole process was not pleasant.

I feel especially bad for the ones already close to 10.They got royally screwed.I don't care to see this sale mechanism ever again.

There really should have been some clearly visible coutner on the fron page. Having the infor buried somewhere on the forum is not the answer. It did no affectm e, I only bought 2 games and was never even considering buying 10, I don't think there even are 10 games that I'm interested in in this Insomnia, but I still see it as a little unfair. They should at least give the people who got screwed over by this copies of The Witcher or something, as a little consolation.

Just chiming in to say: Not cool GOG. This "free" game deal was a gamble to begin with, since you could end up with something you don't really care for. But to lure in people with the promise of free games, have them buy several games, and then later cancel that offer is just plain wrong. Either they completely miscalculated the amount of "free" games they'd need, or this was fully intentional, like those limited quantity lure discounts some physical stores like to pull off.

Either way, really disappointing. I think they should extend their offer, for those who already bought games before the "free game" was cancelled. At the very least, for those who already got close to 10 purchases.

Well, at least now we don't feel so "pushed" to buy more games.
I bought two yesterday and thought about buying a lot today, but with these changes in the middle of promos gog is becoming more and moe like steam or others sellers.
Probably a lot of people were exploiting it if they bought a lot of cheaper games to get the expensive ones, like buying copies of the witcher 1 that they probably already own, but they should have thought about that.

I believe it was a miscalculation from GOG's part and not intentional.

Some games on sale were actually bundles (like Anno, Broken Sword, Legend Of Kyrandia, Two Worlds 2 etc) and actually count as more than 1 games in your library.

So if for example you saw a flash insomnia sale for Anno Series that had 50 copies, if people bought them all, there would be 200 games purchased and not 50.

Crap!

They have agreements with the owners of the games. They made deals to offer only certain amounts of games at sale price and certain amounts for free. So yeah, they can run out. They had a note to that effect from early in the sale (and quite likely from the very beginning, though I didn't check that).

They did say it. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who knew from early Day 1 that the freebies could run out, or that the freebies get easier to get as you buy more games. Even if they posted the entire rule set on the front page, people wouldn't read it ("Too crowded, just show me the important stuff!"). They had a link to the FAQ right there in the insomnia diagram area, and the information was there.

I look at it as something of a gamble. If you only want 2-3 games, then yeah, just buy what you want. If you want 8 games, then you might consider spending $1.50 once or twice and hope for something good (I've seen a few reports of getting The Witcher 3, for example).

They have limited (sometimes very limited) screen real estate, so they have to pick and choose. Right from the start, they put a link to the FAQ right there for people to see more details. They also posted comments in at least two different threads (one of them the official sale thread, the other a french thread) about how they are starting to run out and people need to get over the limit if they are close.

GOG can't force developers to allow GOG to sell extra keys 'just because'. GOG didn't try to screw anyone, they didn't force you to buy a random game key, and they definitely DID have notices about "limited free games" and "freebies are running out some hours from now".

Where did you see this information? I've seen no indication anywhere that the number of freebies required was reset.

If the message was AFTER you bought your 10th game, then you're covered. Contact support, per Konrad's response about missing freebies. They've got a time stamp for when the message went up.

If you didn't know the freebies could run out, then take a few minutes and read the linked FAQ next time. See above about screen space and why the freebies could run out.

People like me read FAQs and manuals before jumping in, precisely to avoid cases like "Why did this happen it's not fair!?" :P

Adding an indicator is an idea I can get behind.

They like to make money off their games too.

Link in this post talking about what to do if you qualified for a freebie (before they posted the Out of Stock message), but haven't received it yet.