I LOLed at the original gag.. and uprepped both it and this :P

But nearly all the games are already discounted by 50%

Keep it coming, I've got 197 more to go. :D

196...

This is essentially letting the buyer pick and choose any items they like from the bundle to receive the maximum discount, which in turn is no different than just applying the maximum discount to every item in the first place. If they can't or won't do the latter in a particular case (sometimes they do, sometimes they don't), I don't see why they would do the former.

GOG already reduces the price of bundles accordingly if you own any of the games on GOG, which most services don't do.

At least on GOG, the price is reduced if you have a game here. And why GOG should allow you to untick games you have elsewhere? Does any other vendor do that? Don't think so.

Most if not all of the comments on this revolve around the trust/ abuse aspect. IMHO, there's another step before that and that's the OP wanting GOG to acknowledge the fact that he/she spends his/her money on their competitors (i.e. other digital stores) as a positive thing for GOG's business. How exactly does that make any (business) sense?
As others said, does the OP demand this from his/her local supermarket or bookstore? And if he/she does, what's the success rate?


I can think of at least two ways to look at it in a positive way:
-- Knowing what's still to come, one can plan their spending in case they lacked the funds for all the games they'd like to get on that particular day.
-- One has a little more time to decide if they'd get one or more games/ bundles they're not 100% certain they want.

That is actually something similar to what retail stores do over in the States (we call it price matching and I don't know if they do it in Europe) and it works but I think it might too easily be abused with the internet. If you go to WalMart with proof that you can get something cheaper at ShopCo then they match the price. On line all you'd need to do is get some friend to post he was selling the game for $1 and ask GOG to match it. Yeah, I don't think so. :P

I think that GOG bundle system is great in the sense that, unlike Steam, if you already bought some games of the bundle through GOG, they discount the price of those game automatically (They even discount you Torchlight even if you got it for free a couple of days ago... now that's cool).

Steam instead, kindly offers you to gift to a friend the games of the bundle that you already have... gez how generous!!

Of course detecting what games you already purchased from different place (Steam specially) would requiere a special deal. Don't forget that buying a game implies they are giving you a high bandwith connection to download the game at any time, so that implies money of course. It would make no sense if they just give you the chance to simply add to your list any game you already have.

Probably feels like the OP is being piled-on, but hey, they're just opinions.

I guess my "worry", if there IS one when talking about buying more games for the ever-increasing backlog, is that we eventually end up with a dozen or so retail sites all selling Steam keys, and that we simply search around those dozen sites for the best price that day to buy the exact same thing that ultimately comes from just one place.

As I said earlier, a fair number of customers of gOg are here because it's not Steam. Myself included. For the proposed change to work there would need to be some sort of integration, a client, etc., and at that point we may as well give up on gOg and its sheer simplicity and instead buy everything from Steam, waiting on the sale du jour.

edit: punctuation

PILED-ON!? He has gone +2 since making this thread and I've gone -8 since posting my tongue twister in this thread. :P

The attention-whore inside you loves it. XD

I dread the day when people will deem a 3$ game as expensive. As for GOG's sales, they are fine. Perhaps a bit too fine if you ask me. We don't need all games to have ridiculous 70-80% discount all the bloody time. Let Steam do that, because GOG doesn't need to become another Steam.

Some stores or chains in Germany do, it's called "Tiefpreisgarantie" ("lowest/best price garanty"). But it's not simply "X sells it for Y moneys, so you'll also only have to pay Y".

First of all, apart from nationwide sales, each individual market can set its own prices or individual sales, even if it belongs to a big WalMart-esque retail chain. As a result each store can decide whether or not to offer price matching and even those which do won't just accept any price from anywhere, even stores of the same chain. Usually they'll only match prices of competitors within about 50 kilometers of their own store. Also if it's a clearance sale, they'll probably won't match it either. However, if they offer price matching they usually allow you 2-4 weeks after a purchase to find a cheaper offer and ask for a refund of the difference, even if the product wasn't on sale when you bought it.

Anyway, one should always keep in mind that it's usually large chains which offer price matching because they can easily cover their losses on the handful of people who use the price matching offer through the sheer volume of sales they have overall. Smaller stores are already struggling to compete with the aggressive pricing of large retail chains and couldn't survive actually price matching the giants.

If GOG (arguably a small store compared to Steam or Origin) attempted to match the sales of its competitors, I'm sure that would spell disaster, even without abuse or after-the-fact matching of discounts...

Keevek was talking about different thing, ie. that WalMart has a deal that you can buy two jeans for a 50% discount, single jeans will get only 20% discount. You go to their store and show a receipt that you bought same jeans (one pair) from them already two weeks ago, so they agree to give you full 50% discount for one pair of jeans, instead of 20%.

As for price matching, some shops had it here in Finland too (e.g. I remember one PC games shop saying they'll pricematch any other store; and when I did that, they simply called the other shop as a fake customer to check whether the price is what I claim).

Anyway, as far as I understand, the whole pricematching practice was later deemed illegal here, and stores are not allowed to do that here anymore. I think it even is about customer protection, ie. the stores will have to offer a cheaper (cheapest?) price to everyone, not only those who are active enough to shop around and check prices from various stores.

I guess the reason is that when some store says they'll price-match any other store, most customers incorrectly take it to mean that whenever some customer tells the store that item A is cheaper somewhere else, the store will lower the price for everyone from then on. That is not the case, they only lower it to that one active customer, and keep the higher price for everyone else. So, passive customers pay extra at the same store, with the wrong expectation that they are getting the same price-matching as everyone else.