I can't say I'd like this idea at all.

This.

I don't like the idea of a points per purchase system, but in that same vein, a policy of buy 10 games, get one free would be fun, similar to the salon chain where I get my haircut. 10th haircut is free! Maybe even enough incentive to buy one more game (i've bought 9, lol).

There are issues, mostly regarding support.

As for the website, the quoting system still manages to fuck up from time to time, there's no way to ban a user from the forum without banning him from his games as well, there's no PM system, no user profiles, reply notification issues, support ticket progress report issues, a lot of things.

AndrewC pretty much mentioned the relevant stuff. And this is just for the online stuff.

The packages / downloads are a whole different story.

@Wishbone:

I guess you beat me to it in designing the GOG points program. I think the important part is that we agree that the numbers have to not add up. I want the person in charge of selling GOG points to promise that we will always have to buy more GOG points than we actually need to purchase a game and have some left over.

Yeah, this is why I generally hate marketing people. I've worked with quite a few of them over the years, and they invariably focus on one thing and one thing only: Get more money! And it doesn't matter who is inconvenienced by this (customers, coworkers, subcontractors), as long as it isn't them.

There's no good way to even tell if you have the most up to date installer for a game... for the rare game they update anyway. If you missed the news item (not really that hard) you probably missed that fact.

+1

Um, not all 20 or so employees of GOG work on the site or its problems. Some of them work in sales and marketing, some are strictly support, still others are in game testing/"fixing" and some are indeed charged with fixing the site and its problems. Knock your number down to maybe 4 or so and I seriously doubt that it is only 8-9 hours a day, 5 days a week. They probably work a lot more than that during each day and definitely more than 5 days a week, but I'm also sure fixing the site's problems are only part of what they have to do. I agree, they need to give us some kind of update on what's really going on and they don't need to be doing anything regarding new features as long as parts of the site/service are still broken, but your expectations based on that math you posted are way out of whack.

Well, they could work on introducing “GOG money account” – they will need it to store extra $16 for each EU citizen who buy W2 here.

I truly do not understand why their support is so weak – it can’t be matter of money. They could create support teams with 5-10 students working part-time, supported with 1 full-time experienced gog employee. That’s inexpensive solution (salaries are not high in Poland + students are even cheaper labor force because of social & tax regulations). That would easily cover 90% of request (with solutions like “clean browser cache”, “run as administrator”, “download all .bin files not only the small .exe”).

As for the gog-points– I don’t like the idea of spending points on “extras” – which should remain free. But I would be glad to spend those points on gog games.

Maybe we will get some extra feature with “GOG money account” (like transfer $50 to your gog account and get $5 extra for purchases here). It would benefit for both gog.com and users on transaction costs (I believe charging 1x$50 "as a rule" cheaper than charging 10 operations $5 each).

Unless they simply send out codes for any GOG and any $5.99 GOG (of course you'd lose the remaining $4 if you used the first code on a $5.99 game).

Or a code to get $16 off a purchase. Could be used similarly to the current gift codes where you can only redeem the games you don't have, if you then send the code do someone else they can redeem the remaining games (unless they already have them) - if you use the money code on a purchase for less than $16, the remaining money could be used with the same code at the next purchase.

A Blue Coin thing on GoG would be cool but the catalogue is currently so small that it wouldn't take you long to make your way through it.

Some of us already have the complete catalogue, and I'm pretty sure I have more than half of it at just over 150 games.

I'd like to see some package deal alternatives for games of the same franchise

Like an Earthworm Jim 1, 2 & 3D package deal
An Divine and Beyond Divinity package deal
and an uFo package deal