I don't really see the usefulness of the hoax. All it did is make people afraid of their purchased goods, and I bet most of that 20x traffic was people frantically downloading their games in case it happened again for real. Natural response.
The only benefit that might exist is if people now quickly buy and download the games they wanted to before. If that was the aim, then I feel insulted for being considered a part of the sheepish herd.

No it isn't.

Was the BP oil spill good publicity? If Steam pulled a stunt like this would it be "good publicity"?

Oh, it has meaning! The thing is, and take note of this, it wasn't fucking funny.

While I didn't appreciate the shut down, I've learned,and so should anyone with the sense God gave chipmunks, to back everything up. What did these people who are complaining do? Download the game, install it, play it and delete it? Then download it a second time if they wanted to play it again? It can take HOURS to download a game. Not to save the download is stupidity. If this were Valve, and they went down or bankrupt, the games you bought and downloaded would be worthless! At least if I can't get on GOG I can still play all the games I downloaded.

I would probably agree that some people need to loosen up. But I still think that there is reason to complain about the nature of this particular prank.

I love digital distribution, for many reasons. And since I love it, I think that more people should use it. After all, a large number of customers for services like this will mean more money to expand them and make them better.

But a lot of people are very skeptical towards digital distribution. I know so many people who completely refuse to even try buying downloadable games/media, and they all have pretty much the same reason. What I hear is always variations on the theme of "But it seems so dangerous - you put your games in their hands; if they suddenly decide to shut down you might lose all your games!"

I've never thought that this is a valid fear. I own a lot of games from places like GOG, Steam and D2D, and I don't fear The Sudden Shutdown Catastrophe - but many others do, and that's what's keeping them away.

By doing a prank on the lines of "Oh, sorry we suddenly have to shut down with no warning whatsoever", GOG has really reinforced those fears in that kind of people. Even if any of them were interested in GOG before, I'm certain that they won't dare try it out now.

I'll remain a loyal customer. But I think that it's sad if the GOG-team has made others less likely to become new customers because of fears like that.

I think you've missed the point. GoG.com entered into a contract with us, their subscribers, when we purchased games through their site. That contract was to provide download access to our games that in Gog's words "we own" whenever and wherever we want. Due to post switch-on bugs this is not curently possible for heaps of people.

Now, many people are pissed about this - we paid money for a service we are no longer receiving - and rightly so.

Essentially GoG.com could have gotten around the whole issue by being up front at the beginning, giving a lead in time so people could download their games ahead of time, and then asked for our patience while they worked through the bugs on a recently live site. But no, their attitude was "we'll turn it on and everything will be fine. Oh shit." and now they are into damage control. At the most polite they could simple be described as ill-advised, though others are using stronger terms.

You're entitled to your opinion, but you're wrong. That isn't the "normal" response at least not in the way you're implying it to be. It's PR, and when more eyes see the site and more purchases are made, it requires justification to consider that anything other than success.

If you walked into a bar, a store, whatever, and handed them your money and the guy behind the counter said, "What, ho, closing down, come back in 4 or 5 days and if we're open I'll give you your goods." And your "normal" response would be, great PR stunt! See ya later.

I don't think so. Yet that is excatly what happened to me and many others. But even that was not the main issue, trust is the main issue.

I don't care what anyone here says -- it was a stupid, stupid stunt. It bordered on fraud. But even if you accept it as a "joke and PR stunt" -- pissing off a good portion of your customers and scaring those yet to be customers into thinking, geez, that could really happen, not so sure about this digital distribution idea, can't be smart.

And who says they're going to get a lot of new customers and sales from this? A lot of the traffic they're getting is probably users trying to frantically download their previously purchased games and others here just out of idle curiosity. One thing we know for sure is that they have *lost* some sales because of this.

Further, a lot of us here were bringing them new customers over the last two years and now many will not be. Again, hard to see how that's a good result.

I'm sure the fuss will die down eventually -- but it was a stupid move nevertheless. Nothing anyone here says will change that and it's not just my opinion -- it's a clearly observable fact that the result, the response, and the effect was hugely negative overall. You need only look at what's happened to the community here to see that.

I hope they recover from it, of course. I've been a big supporter these last 2 years and more. But trust is hard to earn back once you lose it.

Be well!

I forgive them but that still was a stupid publicity stunt.

After some time to think on it, in my mind this stunt hurt Steam more than it did GOG because what scares people the most about Digital Distribution is losing access to your games without warning.

With GOG's lack of DRM, this isn't as big a problem as it is with Steam. If Steam goes down, you really can't reinstall your games.

I also do not believe for a second the Steam will patch away the DRM in the event of their servers going down. I doubt that would be legal for Steam to do.

This publicity stunt hurt digital distribution in general more than it hurt GOG itself.