I'm only interested in new and upcoming releases. All the rest of it is spam so I'm not interested in signing up, unless there is a way to customise it so I only see new releases every couple of weeks or month or so.

If you're telling us, then it's "Why you should subscribe to our newsletter!"
If you're asking us, then it's "Why should you subscribe to our newsletter?"
Hybridising those two together comes across as uncertain.

Mailing Lists / Majordomo / Mailchimp were popular decades ago when an ASCII email was much faster to retrieve on a 10MB-per-hour dialup than browsing to a website but newletters have been obsolete for a long time now. The focus of this service is Good Old Games, not Good Old Newletters and other paraphernalia of that era. For the Newsletter to be worth users' time, it would need a reputation for providing a significant edge over simply visiting the website, and doing that would be counterproductive.

I think it's better for everyone to focus your work-hours elsewhere.

I should suggest to Gog to tie all in-game achivements to the newsletter subscription . :p

Which you can turn off in the settings.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but AFAIK, I (as a newsletter subscriber) never got a free gift that non-subscribers did not also receive.
Maybe free gifts are restricted to users with anti-social media accounts?

I am subscribed, and for some mysterious reason my mailbox didn't explode, wasn't hacked, and their marketing team didn't manage to scam me into buying anything I didn't already have wishlisted.

I think I bought one or two of the offers, when the price and my mood was right.

Usually just meh, scan over it and delete it. About 2 mails a week, I can handle that much. Scanning "Newsletter Discounts" thread would be way more work, and bigger risk the offer will already be taken by the time I see it.

I felt his brain implode all the way over here.

This is exactly why this forum post exists. Just to push to non-regular visitors. I used to subscribe and it was spammy and full of CAPTCHA/remote images that didn't work or give good information for anyone who has reasonably secure email settings. So I unsubscribed and I haven't seen any signs that subscriptions would be less spammy/intrusive now, quite the opposite.

GOG doesn't listen to concerns about privacy/third party snooping so my advice is don't subscribe and let this thread die as it is also pretty spammy.

I think the point is that the setting shouldn't have to exist in the first place; that if GOG is having to scrape nickles from giving our data to "trusted partners", someone in the finance department is doing their job horribly wrong.

Your wish has been heard, unfortunately they have seen it. :(

Apparently this is one of the reasons they have implemented a user-based individual discount and pricing system (without having to use discount codes) in their shop. So the newsletter discount codes might disappear soon anyway.

But having not only regional, but also personalized prices now, for me just opens Pandora's box for all kinds of anti-customer marketing stunts ...

IMHO, It all comes down to: Marketing people are horrible at math.

Typically, the metric chased is "conversions".

I've been working with webshops for 20 years, and whenever we measured conversion rates, we found an average advantage of 1-3% compared to other marketing instruments. That's where marketing people stopped reading, gave themselves a pat on the back, and called it a day.

What they refused to acknowledge was the next sentence in our assessment: Those 3% were easily explained through selection bias. If you compare a group of people who actively and deliberately sign up for a newsletter with the general population, they will always outperform the other group. That doesn't mean your low effort one-size-fits-all mass mailings are awesome.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc--Correlation doesn't equal causality. If you ask people to sign up for a "pork newsletter" and then measure if subscribers to the "pork lovers newsletter" bought more pork than people who didn't sign up, the result is obvious. It only tells you that pork lovers buy more pork. (Surprise, surprise.)

To make matters worse: Marketing loves to abuse newsletter subscriptions to harvest much more far-reaching consent than they need, to double-dip into the pot by sharing (AKA selling) customer contacts with/to "trusted partners" (AKA "anybody who gives us money"). Thereby damaging the company's reputation long-term for a quick couple of Cents on the side. Marketing people notoriously refuse to see a problem with that behavior.

Marketing loves to justify all the damage they cause by saying: Yes, conversion is still horrid, but newsletters don't cost anything, so the return of investment is still fantastic.

No, it's not. Apart from the cost of producing them, which is never as easy as it sounds because E-Mail programs do weird crap when displaying HTML e-mails, newsletters consume tracking software that you have to pay for, mass mailing infrastructure that you have to pay for, and occasionally your SMTP still ends up on a spam blacklist, which takes human resources and time to fix. And, yes, you absolutely do have to pay people to get your domain taken off any spam blacklist. Which isn't easy either, because, once you are on one spamlist, within only a few days, the others typically block you as well. Getting on a spamlist takes no effort. But to get yourself removed, you have to send a request to each one individually. Not to mention, that you need to manage subscriptions, deal with complaints, handle consent info, and legal implications, all of which isn't free either.

And it's not like marketing doesn't have better options. If this was about getting the info out to consumers, it would be way easier to achieve the same with other tools:
A) Sign up and broadcast deals to price comparison engines.
B) Provide RSS/ATOM news feeds, that people can consume without having to subscribe and share personal data (in addition, these feeds are frequently consumed by price comparison engines, so you hit two birds with one stone)
C) Or, go the classic after sales route by providing info on sales related to titles on their wishlist, fresh releases of DLCs to games they already own, or DLC rebates for titles they own.

Except, there is one thing none of these methods produce: Excel sheets and PowerPoint slides.

All this tracking and spamming does exactly nothing to improve conversion, but it does create favorable statistics that are false by design, provide justification for unfounded investments in marketing instruments that annoy customers for no good reason, and produce PowerPoint slides to be presented to superiors. In other words: I'm afraid, newsletters will continue to be pushed, no matter how pointless the content and how little actual benefit they provide to consumers.

With all that said: There are newsletters I subscribed to:
- one is a book, whose chapters are released as mailings in irregular intervals.
- the other is a series of articles on architectural design. There is a new article once every couple of months, but the release dates vary and the articles are not found on the website. Plus, it's original research with high information density.

True, both scenarios could have been handled more efficiently through other options. But in these cases, I understand that some people aren't tech-savvy and have an easier time writing an e-mail than updating a website. Fair enough. The same cannot be said about an online shop whose entire point is to update websites on a daily basis.

Subscribed from the beginning.

I second the motion.

I would like to add that GOG should also have special GOG membership achievements like:
- be subscribed to the newsletter for an entire year
- be subscribed to the newsletter for five years
- be subscribed to the newsletter for ten years
- redeem a GOG newsletter exclusive discount code and purchase the game
- purchase a game that the GOG newsletter says is at the highest discount ever
- subscribe to be notified of a game release then purchase it after you get the notification
- subscribe to be notified when items on your wishlist go on sale then purchase after you get the notification

I'm sure that this would make just being on GOG more fun for people who like achievements as they can gain achievements just from subscribing to the newsletter and purchasing games.

Bruh, put that away....no one wants to see all that ;D

I also don't get were all the knee-jerk commets about the newsletter are coming from.

I've been subscribed to it since it exists and up to this day NEVER got a single mail from anybody else than GOG.

Only information about new games and sales and occasionally an exclusive discount code. That's it.

I _could_ be more informative, generally, though, I have to say.