Vehdra: I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have "sales" where there are people walking away feeling bad and/or unlucky...
PixelBoy: Good point, but then again, if you don't play the potty game, this sale simply functions as a normal "pick 5" sale.
I admit that they could have done the pot thing better... Maybe list 10 games in each pot, and say that what you will get, is 1 of those. Or maybe instead of listing the games names, just say genres "adventure", "fps" and so on. So people wouldn't buy the kind of genres that they dislike.
One last option would be to make the random games always giftable. The downside is, this could seriously devalue these games. But at least, you could easily trade unwanted games, and keep what you like.
Or does anyone think that GOG left that cheating option in place on purpose? I'm very surprised that it's there. Even I could code a generated html page which wouldn't reveal those pot games. So either they made a huge mistake by not realising that, or maybe they felt like leaving an option to actually "wysiwyg" the games before committing to purchase...
I feel like at least part of the reason the "cheating" option was left in was because that kind of information is a standard part of their server response during user checkout. They did do their best to hide it client-side with with some extra CSS though, and even generated an entire new a new set of elements to look like the normally-seen checkout list.
I worked a bit with the marketing team for a digital distributor before, and I found that a big part of a promo is actually how easily the website can be reverted to its normal operations after the promo ends. Just changing some CSS and JavaScript for the client is one thing - but once you start changing the server side e-commerce code, it's a way bigger undertaking. You need to involve a lot more people and could cause store-breaking bugs if the transition into/out of the promo isn't smooth.
Anyways, I think they figured people would be so driven to get those rarer games, that they would end up buying most of the common ones regardless of the existence of the "cheating" option. I know I'm slowly going down that path, at least. =D