http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-04-12-gog-com-steam-sales-send-wrong-message-to-gamers

I thought the bundles also exist to "showcase" the games in the GOG catalogue, giving them some time in the spotlight.
Of course having games in a bundle that you might not want will make the bundle less interesting for you. but hey, maybe you decide to buy the games you actually do want for a 50% discount instead. Seems like a good deal for GOG in the end as well, even if they don't get you to buy the bundle.

And so you bought a game ("Binary Domain"?) that isn't even on GOG somewhere else. So what? If you're happy about your purchase, everything is fine.

The Witcher 2 was 75% off.

Pay in euros. :D

Yeah, I'd be all over Incredipede for 75% off, but instead I get nothing. 50% off isn't any different than it was yesterday, and I wasn't even remotely interested in this bundle a few days ago, so why would I want it now?

I do wish it was 75%, or even 50% off on the main site. You get a DRM-free copy via the Humble Store, which is certainly convenient, you get a Steam key when it gets Greenlit, and if and when they do properly port it to Linux, I'd be able to have access to the Linux version, both through the Humble Store and Steam. I like GOG for a lot of reasons, but indie games isn't really one of them. GOG is not my go-to place for indies, I'd rather get this one from the devs, but they just won't put up a discount of any kind. :/

Going to pass on getting it 50% off. Being indie, hopefully there will be some sort of great bundle in the future to reward my patience. Hopefully. I passed on La-Mulana numerous times, bought a bundle for every reason but that game, and then they snuck it in as a surprise bonus days after I bought it.

Witcher is 75% off. There were several one-day individual 75-80% sales -- role-playing bundle, scandinavian bundle, Telltale bundle, and something else maybe.

Some have been, but they also try to lure you to buy more by offering bigger discounts if you buy more. Quite common tactic used by all digital stores (except that the other stores normally don't compensate it if you have some of the games from the same service already, ie. you end up rebuying the same games from the same service several times due to overlapping deals). I don't recall any other major digital store offering "make your own bundle for 75% off" promos either. The bundles are usually fixed more or less across all digital stores. In GOG those kind of cherry-picking promos would make even less sense (from GOG's point of view), considering they have far less games than e.g. Steam or GamersGate. Then I don't see what's the problem. Is something blocking you from buying the games from where you get the nicest deal? Vote with your wallet.

Cool I get that, they are worried that they will send the wrong message to the gamers, the problem is that message is ALREADY out there so too late boys and girls. Also, that article is a bit old and sort of out of place, GMG, GG and other are already doing the same thing.

Also, whatever your approach to Sales is, if they are good or bad for the industry understand this, an average gamer has a limited budget to spend for games every year. Which means, if every one kept their prices at 100% (and at times devs overprice their games) that said gamer has a very difficult choice. The more discounts there are, the more an average gamer like me will buy.

Also, discounts, especially the heavy ones, in my opinion are EXTREMELY important because they make piracy absolutely NOT worth the effort and keep in mind, a lot of people download games simply because they can't afford yet another 50 Euros for some over priced and hyped game(im not saying that downloading games of torrents is good, its not).

Buying at Sales allowed me to expand my library of games to some more less 300 titles, wihout discounts I would have about 30-40 games simply because I couldn't afford them.

Mind another thing, Indie games are already taking a lot of the market and they don't charge 50 Euros, but often offer an extremely long and fun gameplay (for example: Defender's Quest, Kingdom Rush, Legend of Grimrock, Fieldrunners and many many more). Big companies won't be able to compete with them if they over price their games.

Now tell me this, I want to buy Blood and Blood 2 games, in the pack they were in I would have to spend to much money and am completely not interested in other games included in that pack, while they are at 50% im just not convinced, im on a limited budget and there is a ton of other games I also want to buy. If those two games were on 75% sale I would insta buy them, along with some other if they were 75%, because im always looking at how much fun im getting for a given price.

I doubt I will buy games at 50% at GoG this Sale, there is most likely a lot of people who will do the same. Question is, would you rather me buy 0 games at 50% discount or say a dozen of games at 75%? (to be honest I have like 40+ games on my wishlist would be hard to even begin to decide which ones to buy)

One thing is clear to me, no one cares if i buy those games from GoG or not, nor do I care from whom I buy my games, as long as it is the best deal for me, just trying to point GoG's attention to this.

I have not bought any GOG games this year. There were a few games that i wanted, but i didnt want to buy the whole bundle. Maybe GOG will do 75% off individual games on the last day of the sale.

It would be nice to grab them here, sure, but if GOG isn't going to compete with some games as far as pricing, I just buy them elsewhere.

Indie games seem to be especially prone to not getting as big a discount here as elsewhere. An example from my cruise around DD sites is The Book of Unwritten Tales, which is 66% off on Green Man Gaming and you can further reduce the price using their 30% discount code. The best I've seen for this game on GOG as an individual purchase is 50% off. Sure, GOG offers 75% as bundles, but I don't always want all the games in a bundle and the minute I remove one game the price rises for the rest, and if I do buy the bundle, i can't give away the game(s) I don't want since it all comes as a single key. As opposed to making me just shrug and buy the bundle, it just makes me not want to buy it at all.

As noted in the link in Gameon's post, GOG seems to be worried about 'cheapening' the value of games. But if they're not going to compete with other sites, they're just not going to sell as many games.

The problem is AAA games get a lot of full priced sales because OMG GOTTA PLAY IT NOW. There was no way I was waiting for a sale on Skyrim or Assassin's Creed 3 or whatever else.

Indie games don't really have that. What indie game MUST be played immediately? Has that kind of fan anticipation? Very few. So lowering their value hurts them more than AAA games.

Did you just have a rant on the pricing of games while saying that 'sales' made it possible for you to get about 300 games instead of the 40 you would have to deal with under different conditions?

I think there's another aspect to this that you hint at here: deep discounts will prompt people to make impulse buys and expose them to new game developers/genres/styles of game that they might otherwise pass on. This could well lead to more sales for that dev/publisher in the future if the buyer ends up really liking the game. I know this has been the case for me personally on more than one occasion.

With new indie games the deep discounts make more sense than with classics. Reason being that GOG has had to do more legal and Q&A work to get those old games (like Blood 1-2, and similar games originally made for Win9x or DOS) to run on modern systems and to sell them here, and more importantly, if people have problems with those older classics, people blame GOG, no one else.

With newer games, the digital store can much more easier just point the finger to the original publisher. Take for example Saints Row 2 on Steam with which many people have had various problems.

When people complained to Valve (Steam), Valve said they should contact the game publisher.

When people complained to the publisher (THQ), they said they should complain to the developer, or in some cases just fell silent.

And so it goes...

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1381873

So, the old classic games cost more for GOG to release in their service, so you should expect to pay more for them than for new indie games which are guaranteed to work on new PCs even without GOG meddling with it, and the finger can still be pointed to the original developer in case there are problems. GOG doesn't have to try to fix them, the developer does.

That's the problem with the older classics in GOG: people demand perfection from them (and from GOG), but at the same time people don't want to pay up.