As we all find some time to relax after a year of hot releases and big sales, we thought it would be fun to look back and give you a short recap of GOG.COM's Winter Sale and listen to your opinions on the event.Our annual Winter Sale ran for 23 days this time (from December 11th, 2019 to January 2nd, 2020) with almost 3,000 deals for games, including completion bundles and special game collections. One title, Lost Sea, had the highest discount amount them - coming in at 95% off!
If you followed the entire Winter Sale, you were also able to claim four free games (Wasteland 2, POSTAL 2, POSTAL: Classic and Uncut, and Tower of Time), and eight more games through GOG Connect if you already owned them on Steam. These offers were super popular and we're always very happy when we can give you such gifts.
Behind the scenes of the Winter Sale
While our Winter Sale has a lot happening on the front end, what is not usually visible is all the work that goes into making it happen, not only weeks before the sale (like discount approvals and designing the takeover images) but also during the event. We were constantly evaluating the performance of the sale, updating the front page based on hard data and our gut feeling, while listening to your feedback, for example, to help you discover the best deals.
A new option to hide DLCs in the catalog was also introduced during the sale (which we're still testing and improving) and should help you in the future when searching for games on sale. We also gathered and shared our recommendations and suggestions with you through a series of promo pages with the best deals, top-rated games, and more. It shouldn't be a surprise that the Good Old Games themed selection was the most popular one!
Another new element of this sale was the featured newsletters that included special limited-time offers. We've been testing this format for some time now and we can see that a lot of you enjoy it, especially the fact that these newsletters allow us to offer you higher discounts than usual. It's worth it to subscribe as there are plenty more cool offers to come!
The Winter Sale is also a very busy time for our Support team (pictured above!). The number of support tickets in December grew by 70% in comparison to the previous month and by 40% in comparison to December 2018. We usually send the first response to your tickets within 24 hours but that time grew to approx. 37 hours in December 2019 while our whole Support team kept working basically around the clock. This is why we want to thank you for your patience as we're currently clearing our backlog trying to resolve every ticket.
Finally, let us share a few technical facts regarding the Winter Sale. Our IT and Web teams kept a close eye on the website performance to make sure that the front page is loaded faster than it did during the prior year, even though we put even more games on display. To make sure of that, we doubled the number of servers during the Winter Sale. December 30th turned out to be the busiest day with six times more traffic than usual. At the same time, our daily data transfer for game downloads was 2.5 times higher. You played a lot of games during the holidays!
Oh, and between all that, we somehow managed to squeeze in our annual Christmas party and make a special Blade Runner cosplay photoshoot in our office :)
What a year it was!
Overall, we want to thank YOU for participating in our Winter Sale. Next to the Summer Sale, it's the biggest event of the year for us and we already can say that our recent sale was by far the biggest Winter Sale in the history of GOG.COM Store. A perfect conclusion to
a year full of exciting game releases and events!
What are your impressions regarding GOG.COM's Winter Sale? Which games did you buy? Would like to read more look back articles like this one? Let us know in the comments below! 