I don't think there's anything crummy about it this sales tactics, since the trick is pretty transparent - I can clearly see the strings. At my first Insomnia, however, I got fooled into buying more than I would have. The counting-down-last-chance-to-buy thing kinda overshadowed everything else. At the time, I remember that I had some of the same concern as you.

What like a hostage crisis or something? :P

Well, one could say that Jack Keane took the entire site hostage that one time... What a selfish git.

you're not alone.

this is my least favourite type of gog sale. a lot of it has to do with "digital items" and "scarcity" - words that should never mix. i'm also not really a fan of the impulse-buy nature of the insomnia sale [or, really, the "you really shouldn't sleep, you might miss out" feel of the sale.]

there's lots here i wouldn't recommend, but...

...some folks here like it. that's fine.

i refuse to give money to a sale type i don't like. [there have been "mystery gift" type sales that i /certainly/ would never give money to.]

the best kind of sale to me is the sort of sale that allows you to make an informed purchase by giving you the time to look up the game, etc. insomnia is the anti-thesis of that.

[for the sake of reference: i was here for the first insomnia. didn't like it then, either.]

Do like me: don't do anything.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/insomnia_virgin_club/page1

Give it six years.

I modded Gede's script to alert me on unseen offers as well as wishlist content. New games arrive in the afternoon where I am (fun fact: three thousand citizens of Wallis and Futuna immigrated to Moscow in 2015, according to Russian immigration authorities). When something new pops up, I see it. If something new appears when I'm not at work, it will reappear in the morning anyway because the number of games per batch is so low. I buy everything I want so freebies aren't exciting.

On another hand, I'm actually happy with the lineup, except for stripped editions. My respect to Nordic Games for offering the complete edition of BoUT2 (I already own it tho).

TL;DR I'm off to sleep.

^ This. At least the games are more spread now.

As one of the folks who are at work during day, I may offer some insight about what they do.

First, you can ignore insomnia, like I thought when I first learned about this year format. Too much distraction to do anything productive. And it's not like "once in a lifetime chance", the discounts so far are nothing exclusive to this sale. GOG is running some sale constantly, if you don't get it now, you can get it in a month when another more time-friendly sale pops up.

The second option is not suitable for everyone (construction workers might struggle with it a bit, for example). But if your day job involves computer, there are to warn you when game you like pops for sale. It helps to have a wishlist, or look through another [url=https://www.gog.com/forum/general/sleep_sheep_insomnia_sale_tracking_thread_201603/page1]thread where you can see what games are on rotation. This worked 100% for me so far - 4 games out of 4. One of them brand new, not even released properly yet. I saw it mentioned in "where the hell...wednesday" thread, did some research, thought it looks interesting and easily grabbed it when it next came up in 25 copies.

I agree that it is a bit sad when random internet hackers help GOG to get more money, but you can't please everyone at once, and neither can GOG. I'm sure there are people who like it this way, there are people who find it tolerable with the right tools (me), and some just have to wait for next sale.

Steam have never done anything like this. If they did then the games would disappear so fast they'd get no end of refund requests from people who bought the wrong game by mistake because the one they wanted disappeared before they could click on it.

But yeah: don't like - don't buy.

I've never seen any other gaming store use this particular promotional concept to date. When GOG first experimented with the Insomnia sale concept about 2.5 years ago, they were exploring new ideas to do something different. It was received by people with mixed feelings however it turned out to be extremely popular with people also. It seems that the people who like it tend to really really like it, and the people who hate it seem to really really hate it, with some like me thrown in the middle for good measure.

GOG got a _LOT_ of feedback both positive and negative from the promo, and the GOG forum topic for the original Insomnia promo got more posts on it in a few weeks than I think any other forum post here has ever had. People kept talking in there for many months after.

Additionally, the first Insomnia sale sprung a new GOG community meme which we all affectionately refer to as "The Great Keaning".

This came about because instead of having fixed time periods to sell unlimited games in like many gaming distributors use for promo, GOG decided to reverse the idea and have a fixed number of games to sell in an unlimited time period. So for each game they estimated how fast it might theoretically sell and then chose a default number of units to sell for each game. With some games such as the various Dungeons and Dragons games, they sold mega fast no matter how many the limit was. It was not unusual for 2000 copies of Neverwinter Nights to disappear in 5 minutes for example. But then some other games ended up not as quick to move either due to being much higher priced and/or being not as popular or for other reasons. As such, some games they estimated far too high as to how many games would sell in a given amount of time, and so some games ended up coming up in the sale and staying there for an hour or more, which took the high-speed "keep your eyes glued to the screen" aspect of the promotion fail to deliver. The game "Jack Keane 2" was one of the highest priced games in the promotion for example at around $11.99 or something like that, and so naturally less people will buy higher priced games coupled with needing to sell several hundred copies - it stalled the sale for 7 hours! Many jokes were made about it at the time, which is why during these promotions you'll still people make "Keane" jokes. :)

So, the promo worked out well for GOG in the end, and was liked by many despite its shortcomings, so they took everyone's feedback into account and brought Insomnia back many months later for a round 2. It was improved in many ways and seemed to be more well received all around. Each time they've done another one since then they have further refined it, sometimes in good ways and sometimes in bad ways. Either way, they're experimenting to find out what works best and what does not and sometimes the only way to find this out is to try it, especially when you're trying to create new promotional ideas that nobody else has really done before.

So the Insomnia sale thing is absolutely nothing like Steam has ever done before. It is very GOG unique top to bottom, and it is tweaked each time they do it based on the vast feedback they receive from the community, both good and bad. This time around it seems that they've decided instead of doing 3 full rounds with larger fixed numbers of games that they are going to do many more rounds with smaller per-round game counts in order to move from game to game more quickly. That makes a lot of sense if one has been around for previous Insomnia promos as some games stalled the sales forever which could be rather frustrating to say the least. But this time it looks like they might have made too many rounds with too few games per round as some games last on the screen for less than 30 seconds. :) Obviously they still need to tweak this somewhat for future Insomnia promos.

I'm sure they gather timing statistics from all of these events, so with this new promo they'll have a whole new set of data to go by for planning future promos of this nature, attempting to find that happy medium where games appear for a reasonably long amount of time so we don't miss them, but not so long as to put the brakes on the sale for 7 hours like Jack Keane 2 did. :)

Like it or hate it though, Insomnia is a GOG born idea that no other store out there has done and which seems to be very popular overall with the community here. If it was universally hated, then they'd get universal hate and they'd not sell many games likely and they'd stop doing it. People who dislike it or even hate it, simply can avoid it entirely and come back in the Summer and WInter for the normal type promos.

There, I Fixed It For Ya! ;oP

how should this feel very Valve-like when Valve has never done anything at like this and is now in the business of having games permanently available at the lowest sale price all through the sale?

My god. Logic and reason. So beautiful to witness firsthand.

This is exactly what Steam's flash sales used to do, act as a driver of traffic and a community activity for folks on Reddit, SteamGifts, and elsewhere, until Steam stopped doing them. So it's not "Valve-like", anymore.

And Steam never engaged in limited quantity tactics. Limited time, but never limited quantity.