Sincerely, I mean no disrespect, but have you ever worked in IT or been a developer on server software? I have (the latter). And it just doesn't work that way.

True, some things don't scale just by throwing more resources at them. But, anecdotally, I have never had an issue with a Steam sale. And you can bet that Amazon gets slammed far more aggressively than GOG does. So it's not an unsolvable problem.

Furthermore, any professional server hosting site worth its salt will be glad to work with an online retailer to scale up their resources temporarily during peak times such as a sale or the Christmas season, etc. They really don't have to run excess servers 24/7/365.

Gotta agree 100%. I have spent the last 30 minutes trying to open my surprise gift box and to no avail. All I get is a spinning disc that keeps on spinning and spinning and spinning. I simply don't have the patience for this kind of stuff. I have better things to do then spend hours of my time trying to save a few dollars on a couple of games. Sorry GOG, but its Just not worth it in my book. I might log on again later and give it another go. Then again, I might not.

I understand you're upset, I admit it's very annoying trying to do anything on GOG right now (and I agree they should be better prepared in the future). You are just rubbing people in the wrong way right now because your style of writing is very confrontational, which in most gaming forums would probably not stand out, but it does in the GOG community. A lot of us are old farts who frown on peace disturbances. ;O)

I think we can all agree GOG should do better than this, but mistakes happen and I'm pretty sure they didn't plan it on purpose. Swearing at GOG is not going to get you better service than by asking politely. Taking out your frustrations on community members is even less effective, and not likely to get you sympathy.

I'm not saying this to be nasty, just FYI.

I haven't even tried to open the present offers yet. Just incase its something I'd want to buy I don't want the server to take a dump in the checkout process.

At least the Fallout games are free for 2 whole days. so things should be calm enough in a few hours to get them.

Another thing that baffles me, is that even the forum is almost unusable.
Granted, I don't know that much about IT development, but it can't be that hard to make the forum servers separate and independent, right?

So, I've been trying to get Anachronox for more than half an hour. Either the game page doesn't load, or when it does, the "add to cart" button doesn't show up. I'm used to GOG being slow or crash a few times during major sales, but it's never been so bad in the past.

As the game library is read-only, making access to the game library on a separate duplicate database is not rocket science.

Neither is compartmentalizing mostly independant parts of the website like the forums so that it isn't bogged down with the rest of the server during a huge sale.

My guess is that they did a cost/benefit analysis of the problem (consciously or not) and determined that it wasn't worth their trouble to prevent the current site-wide paralysis due to the sale.

The Steam reference was unnecessary, but his frustration is not entirely unreasonable. Escalation is not a cutting-edge technical problem that has never been encountered before. GOG is at least a medium sized company at this point and they have the technical/financial resources to address this.

Agreed. My point is there is a right and a wrong way to complain about these things, and this is not the right way unless you intend to start a flame war.

Mine was Triple Town which is not my kind of game. So, I'll pass on that today. Maybe, the next one will be good.
My Triple Town gift I have 24 hours to purchase it.

Answering in the spirit of commentary, and also meaning no disrespect, I work in IT now. Not in dev, but in client support and implementation. I can tell you that the perfect-world scenario is a dream only achieved in the mass market, in my experience, by Amazon, and that's by pure force of cash-flow.

I've only been on GOG for a few months, and it's my impression that the site is stepping up in scale in a big way, not necessarily in an easy glide but in big, splashy jumps. That sort of transition is only easy in retrospect.

Anecdotally also, I've had issues with Steam sales in years past (their sales are not that great currently, but I had transactions that would crash out endlessly during their old summer and holiday events). I remember when mp3.com was down for ages. Flickr has been out for days at a time, even after they were a Yahoo company. The whole reason people were suspicious of Steam originally was because they worried about what would happen if the servers went down, because that sort of thing does happen. I mean, earlier this year Google was down for, what, eight hours? 911 goes down alarmingly often. It's part of life in the modern age.

Admittedly GOG should have seen this coming, but hey. In the world, most people don't. After Insomnia and now this, I'm hoping they get the information they need to properly step up service.

Wow. That's pretty frightening, actually.

Thanks for your perspectives. They are appreciated.

I mean no offense but you obviously don't maintain any servers...yes things like this happen but in this day and age there are so many cloud services and ways to scale up to the power you need right away so no this should not be happening right now, at least not hours after. Yes Steam has issues every now and then but they don't have them for hours on end like GoG is having right now.

I am unable to stay logged in. Is anyone facing this, I log in then get error page. After few tries, I got in, now when I try to buy a game it makes me login again then fails!!

Yeah I've been having that problem as well.