> Wanting to buy a bunch of games on sale.
> Put them into the cart.
> Buy some wallet funds with paysafecard.
> Go to checkout.
> Can't buy them because apparently I own some of them.
> Go through the cart to remove them.
> TADA! It's 15:00 MET. Too bad, sale's over.
> Wish I could refund wallet purchases made with paysafecard to buy the stuff on Steam.
> Wish CDPR/GOG would accept direct debit mandates.

Seriously, this is the second time shit like this has happened to me.
They should improve their UI in a way that makes it easier to see whether or not you already own a game or even better, introduce a way to remove all already owned games at once from the cart.
Also they should allow for direct debit either through SEPA mandate or PayPal.

TL;DR: DRM-free is good and all, but if you make it unnecessarily difficult to buy the games you want on a sale: Get bent!

P.S.: There is also a good reason why Valve is running their Steam sale all the way through to the 5th: Many banks don't process transactions until the next couple business days after New Year, including wages and bonuses some employees receive at the end of the month of the last year. At least that's the case here in Germany and some other important markets.

They should change the system to make some things work better but why did you wait until the last minute to try and buy that those things?

didnt you have like 2 weeks to buy the games you want?
you can only blame yourself to keep this for the last minute

Here's the TLDR.

Look, nobody's saying everything is perfect around here - far from it. But you can't expect GOG to extend a sale for as long as you wish and give you a back rub just so that you'll buy games here...

As others said, the sale was on for plenty of time.

This is an awfully narrow complaint about an awfully avoidable situation...

Anyhow, I'm in Germany and I never received my wage at the beginning of the following month.

I generally wait until the end of a sale and reassess my cart to prevent impulsive buying behaviour and overspending.
The way already-owned games are marked in the cart and that they are sometimes, for whatever reason, not marked as owned on the storefront is suboptimal and more often than not hardly visible to me. I've already opened a less-ranty wishlist ticket about this, but I don't expect anything to come of it.
It took me five minutes to manually resolve the issue while it could be solved in a couple of seconds by a button that automatically removes all already-owned games with one click. As a preventive measure, hiding already-owned games from the storefront would help alot, too. Partially, not "only". No, I can't expect GOG to extend their sale for me or anyone else. But I, and everyone else, can expect GOG to improve their user interface and experience.
After over twelve years they should have figured things out on that front, but I keep bumping into inconveniences over and over again. Their store is not as refined as their competitors'. I did on some jobs. Some payed me in the middle of the month. Some companies even gave me the choice.
I've just illustrated that GOG may be missing out on potential customers by ending the sale right on the Monday after New Year. On top of that: In the middle of the day in Europe and early morning in the Americas.
This is prime time for PR stunts, not for sales! Maybe.

Discounts will only get better for games. So why buy now if you don't intend to play soon? (Says the man with thousands of games in his backlog).

Did you not try to use PayPal? It's there. It's what I primarily use. Agreed on the 2nd (and there are many issues with how the store DB is structured), but the store is usually pretty clear on what you own. It's usually marked as "owned" on the sale page before you can add it to your cart.

GOG's Winter Sale started on the 16th and Steam's Winter Sale started on the 22nd?

Hey, it's okay, you can quote me on that, you don't have to hide my identity.

To make sure you have it?

I was trying to buy something from Steam during their Halloween sale, and then their store bugged and people (including me) couldn't complete the purchase.

Now there's another Steam sale, but to my surprise the game has for some unknown reason been removed from Steam. It's not available elsewhere either.

So the only way to have that game, in hindsight, would haven been to buy it early, download, and back it up.

I know that's a rare case, and there are always other games to be played, but having games removed from the store isn't an unknown thing with GOG either.

Yea, I know, I do sometimes buy games because of this above reason.

Whilst this is true, I wonder what GOG's record on removing games is. On Steam, I waited for too long and games got removed from the store, never to be seen again anywhere else. I am specifically talking about direct debit via PayPal. PayPal does offer this service in Germany but the seller has to accept this method. Steam does, GOG doesn't. I found out about this on the forelast store-wide sale when I wasn't able to purchase anything here either. It was a different situation with the same overall result.
This time I used a paysafecard to purchase wallet funds prior to the actual purchase to have no rude awakening, but I had. This is what mainly fueled this rant. I've just wasted €50.00 I could have also spent on Steam's sale. It's not like the money is gone, but it's no longer a current asset of mine.
If everything would have gone as planned, this thread would not exist.
Exactly, I had the same thought. Thank you for answering to one of my then-unasked questions.

Not to sound rude, but: it's not exactly GOG's fault if you wait till the last minute, now is it?More like "mostly".As others said, GOG cannot be expected to keep sales running forever just because some might not be able to take part in them for whatever reason.