Doesn't take Einsten in understanding that using a gun to oblige people to (and even in that case you have a choice...), is not the only way you can exploit goodwilled customers.

Nobody needs games. Nobody. You don't need them. I don't need them. Games are not a necessity. Games are a luxury. Don't gamble if you can't handle the chance of disappointment. I suppose you think people should be able to buy a piñata for each game on the list that they want and then dictate to GOG what games they are to receive in each piñata.

In general, the site is not for gambling but this particular sale is. Notice on the front page that it mentions "mystery games"? That means you aren't supposed to know what you're getting until you've paid. That's a gamble. You risk getting something you don't want. Wait until you've grown up and are on your own. Try acting spoiled and entitled when things don't go your way in the real world and see how far that gets you.

Anyone who's crying over not getting exactly everything they wanted from the piñatas shouldn't have bought them. Anyone who abused the system for the piñata sale should be banned from all future piñata sales. You know they'd pull this same crybaby shit again if they get the chance. GOG is just going to lose money because of people like that.

May karma run over your dogma.

I m completely disappointed by what I ve got, yet no refund asked, because I ve taken the gamble.

But I m allowed to feel tricked as some of these games are trash, low score and seen cheaper on other sales.

As a goodwilled and long term customer, I feel the game selection, and relative chance associated, were bad enough.
So my complain.

While is my bad to have thrown in the bin my money, I wonder who set the foundatuon to instill this feeling in the customers in the first place.

No matter what, GOG is moving away from me slowly, but steadly.

That's how it goes, sometimes. In a real gambling establishment, the odds always favor the house. I imagine it's no different for this sale. Got a couple of games I wasn't really interested in, myself. Two were games I'd thought about buying, one was something I'd never heard of and two are THPPPPT! That's the chance I took. I still saved almost $20, if you include the money I lost on those two games. Not a bad deal, overall, if you ask me.

One of the games I didn't want (Shattered Haven) is rated 3.5 stars and the other (Beyond Good & Evil) is rated 4.5. Oh, well. Maybe I'll get around to checking them out someday. Next time a sale like this comes up, simply ask yourself if buying exactly what you want would be better than risking disappointment. I'll probably give it another go, though.

Well, this wasn't a gamble. Think about what has actually happened.

GOG gave you an indication of what game you might get. It didn't confirm what game you will get.

GOG takes your money

GOG offers you a game (be it 5 star, 1 star, broken etc)

You take a look at the game. If you decide to keep it - great! If, for whatever reason, you decide you don't want to take GOG up on it's offer. (be that you don't want the game, you already have the game etc) You are within your rights to not accept what GOG has offered you.

You ask for your money back if you decide not to take the offer

GOG gives you back the money.

As much as you may think otherwise, you have done nothing morally wrong but not accepting GOG's offer after they have taken your money. GOG, on the other hand, by not confirming up front what you'll get before taking your money, has wasted both your time and their time. GOG have also been quite immoral in potentially offering you a below value product in the first place.

Also, think about this - people shouldn't have felt pressured into accepting a game they don't want, if they didn't know explicity that was what they were getting. This is why your digital rights allow you to not accept GOG's offer.

GOG don't need to be selling their games for so cheap. The could easily sell them for a higher price, and then not have the potential of people accepting offers they don't want. Why haven't they?

I think it's disgusting that GOG has given the impression that people should be accepting the games that they have been offered.

Yes, it is. Right. What you might get. If you see a huge list of things that you might get and choose to spend your money in the hope of getting what you want and risk that you might not get it then that's a gamble. HURRR... :B GOG accepted your money after you offered it when you didn't know what you'd be getting. GOG gives you a random game that you paid for when you knew you wouldn't find out what you received until after you spent the money. Why do you say games are broken like they have their own category? You know there are games of all ratings that aren't completely bug-free, right? Developers are responsible for most, if not all of the bugs. I'm sure at least a few of your favorites have bugs that you're willing to excuse or you aren't aware of them. Who can say how many games in the history of electronic games have ever been without bugs? I'm not suggesting bugs are okay but they will exist until software no longer exists.

You're choosing to spend money on software when you aren't sure if it'll work or not because of bugs. Sounds like a gamble, to me.

I like the idea of the sale, but I'm a little frustrated with it. When I used to have more money, this is the kind of thing I would have enjoyed, even if I ended up losing money. I would have bought tons of pinatas just for the fun of it. I've went through some financial issues though over the last couple of years, and sales like this aren't real good for that. I ended up buying 10 pinatas even though I shouldn't have. Nobody forced me to do it though so I can hardly be mad at gog for that.

I think the distaste I have in my mouth over it, is that I spent $30 USD on 10 pinatas and got ZERO games I was wanting. Zero. I didn't expect to get Tyranny, Pillars, Full Throttle, etc. and rake in $100 USD worth of games for $30. I consider myself to be a fairly reasonable person. But, I figured I'd end up with something I was looking for (some were even cheaper ones like Day of the Tenticle, which is currently barely more than the price of a pinata). So now, I can't afford to spend any more money. I spent more than I should have already, and ended up with zero games. Hell, even if I had more money to spend on pinatas, I'd have to get ridiculously lucky on the next few just to even break even with the current sale prices. Oh, and since they've added more games that I personally am uninterested in to the pinata pool, my odds of getting even a single one of the games I was hoping for out of another pinata is almost zero at this point.

Ah well. Like I said, nobody forced me to buy them. I expect to lose my a$$ when I go to the casinos or play the lottery - that's why I generally avoid those activities. But I don't walk in to Wal-Mart and hand them $100 dollars and they give me a mystery cart full of stuff I don't want or need, and I didn't expect that would happen here with games, either.

I guess this is a useless post other than just being a mild rant. Ultimately, I think the pinatas are great for someone who has money to burn and is interested in a wide variety of games, and maybe has a smaller game library that they are looking to expand. For someone like me who doesn't have much money to burn, hates entire genres (like RTS - 4/10 pinatas I received contained RTS games, which I can't stand), and has a Steam library of around ~600 games (2/10 pinatas I got were games I already owned on Steam), then the pinatas really aren't ideal.

Ah well. Lesson learned. Best of luck and have fun to those of you who are still buying the pinatas!

I fully agree with what DoomSooth said here and I'm the example of gamer who didn't want to gamble and didn't bought any piñata. I think the whole idea is nice and from what I can see, GOG organized it really fair, with a lot of valuable titles, no empty shots and by avoiding games which may be interpreted as a total loss of money.

For me 3$ is just too much to try my luck making 3-5 bets (I doubt I'd stop after the first one). So I've just used my 3 dollars to buy System Shock for me and Clive Barker's Undying as a gift code from the current sale and I'm happy owner of the games I want (no risks included) :D

Of course I feel a pain of potential loss, but I'd rather live with that then making compulsive bets and drowning in frustration ;))

I think it's exactly opposite. If you have small game library the odds are you probably own mostly your favorite games/genre. That's my case - 250 titles, most of them are cRPGs (plus free stuff, GOG connected Humble games etc.). In my case buying piñata would bring me something from another genre (which I may dislike), most probably some classics, which are quite cheap during other sales.

The best odds are for people who already own all the good old games and now are open to trying new releases/genres.

People with limited time or funds should better keep away from piñatas, at least if they don't focus mainly on fun of gambling.

Qwertyman: We all have our weaknesses. I bought *ONE* Piñata out of curiosity and got lucky it was a decent Mac/Linux title (Colonization), so I stopped there. But if you know that buying one is going to tempt you to engage in uncontrolled or detrimental behavior, then you are wiser and stronger for opting out of it altogether.

My refund took less than a day, but it was a weekend request, so totally understandable.
Other times, whenever I contacted support I got a reply within hours, sometimes minutes.

Have you received the automated reply email about your request?
if not, try again.
If yes, just go to the support centre online and post an update/question about the progress.

Well, I think it could go either way, concerning library size. A person with a library of ~50 games on gog, but has 200 games on their wishlist, may find that they have a high % chance of getting a game on their wishlist in each pinata, which makes the pinatas a great way to start knocking off wishlist titles (if many of those titles are included in the pinata pool). And like you said, someone who is interested in broadening their horizons with new types of games, it works for those people too.

By larger library size, I was included other places as well, though. For example, I own a big chunk of the games in the pinata pool on Steam already, and I can't afford to pay twice for games. So that's why I say, someone with a large library of games (to include other sites) may find that they have too high a chance of getting a game they already own on Steam for example, then they do a game from their own wishlist here on gog.

I have a substantial library on gog as well (few hundred games), but I own very few of the games in the pinata pool here (but many on Steam, like I said).

I wouldn't have minded seeing something like that, but it would have been too difficult and probably cost-prohibitive for gog to implement correctly. Maybe a situation where wishlists could somehow affect what was received from the pool, but that would be open to abuse. Or perhaps where someone could choose one genre to exclude from the pool (which in my case would have been RTS), to decrease the odds of receiving a useless game.

These are nice thoughts, but sort of defeat the purpose of the pinatas. It's a chance at a higher priced game for $3 with the risk of getting something you may not want. If the risk of failure is reduced, then so should the chance of better rewards be. That's the very nature of odds of gambling.

HOWEVER, since this isn't a true casino / lottery gambling scenario, I think there are other ways they could have done it to make it more equitable for both gog and the consumer. Example:

Instead of a pinata for $3, where there is a low chance at getting a ~$20 game, but a high chance at getting a game the buyer has absolutely no interest in... instead the pinata costs $5, where there is a still a low chance the buyer may receive a higher-valued reward, but there is a also a chance the reward may be valued at less-than $5, but is guaranteed to be an item on the buyers wishlist.

So, going with this example, even a losing gamble on the pinata would at least still provide a game the buyer was interested in, albeit a game they could have purchased for less than $5 (maybe even a game that was only $1.49 or $0.99). The risk of loss is still present in this case, which would allow gog to maintain the chance at offering higher-valued titles.

(Clearly this would bring up an issues where it would probably be too complicated to integrate everyone's wishlist with the sale, and then what happens when a person only has more expensive titles on their wishlist, etc.)

I don't know - I would just rather see a situation where the 'mystery game' could still apply and be fun, but where the risks aren't as financially extreme as they are at the casino.

Hopefully what I was trying to say isn't confusing; apologies if it is!

Oh absolutely. I don't have any issues avoiding gambling. Fortunately I'm not one with an addictive personality. I've spent very little money on games (because of my situation) lately, which is why I allowed myself to spend a little on the pinatas. Initially, when people were posting their results with the pinatas, many of those people were getting the games I was interested in, so I mistakenly assumed my chances of getting at least one game I wanted would be higher than it actually was. I was a bit shocked to go 0/10 on mine. Poop luck.

When you buy software from GOG (or Steam, or Origin) there is always the risk for error, and game breaking bugs. That's a gamble too then. That's why we have refunds so we can get our money back in those situations. You can even buy games, not play them, and get a refund. If the store is willing to sell you 20 games in one go - if you don't play them, you refund all of them (within a certain time period)

Why shouldn't the same apply here?

As for me trying to bankrupt GOG - Gog would have had various estimates of people who had the same game on steam and would have costed the returns. With other games, GOG would have known from it's normal sales how many returns they got for the games. Again, they would have costed that in their models.

Gog would also have been aware that everyone could have selected digital refund, and just get the games they wanted. They would have costed that too.

If GOG want's to sell games extremely cheaply, good on them. However, it isn't right to wrap this up in a mystery surprise, and expect people to accept goods that aren't suitable for them.

I made people aware that they can refund anything that isn't suitable for them. I've encouraged people to buy pinatas when they are fully aware of their rights.

-removed