The fact that there was 20 times as much trafffc interest as normal shows that the PR stunt did work!

It was a clever use of GOG's limited resources, it generated a lot of interest and flushed out flocks of headless chickens - who were 'feeling threatened', etc... Poor lambs.

Well done GOG.

Simple solution for me and it hasn't failed me yet.....Buy game, Download game same day, save game to HD, Enjoy said game later on that day.

Or for those that don't want to play a game they just bought...Buy game, Download game same day, Save game to HD for later play....

Seriously guys, not trying to be an ass but it's really a simple solution, i mean most comps nowadays can handle the extra gigs of HD space, i know mine can no problem, i 've D/Led about a 100 games from GoG and i'm not suffering from any extra burden. That said...

GOG WELCOME BACK

Possibly, if those people stuck around long enough to buy something. As for me, since there is actually nothing new worth looking at, I'll just go back to my monthly perusal and occasional check if I get a notice in email about any specials I'm interested in.

Considering the way they've done things in the past it would have been better if they had kept the site up and running, told us something big was coming with one of their famous count-downs and then rolled the site over to the new look on the spot without the downtime. Right now I have a bitter taste in my mouth, not because they were offline for four days, but because when they came back up I didn't actually think their update was good enough to validate the stunt. If they had gone down, and then come up with a 50% sale on all items, or 100 new games or something then sure, that would have been awesome. This? This was just an anticlimax, and I think that is more the reason why people are annoyed than anything.

Well, you know what they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

However, this is never a good way to treat your customers!

This is one mistake that I will deign to forgive, but only because GOG.com is normally such a great website.

A good way to announce going from beta to alpha would have been to come right out and say it, and rely on word of mouth advertising. I for one, would have at least blogged about it, like I did about the false closing. Making customers upset, even if it's only slightly miffed like me, is never, ever the way to go!

I already had backups of all my games, just in case something like the closing actually happened for real.

Your apparent assumption being that the extra traffic had absolutely nothing to do with people hammering the servers trying to download all their games and extras once they were available again. What exactly is that assumption based on???

From the very beginning I felt that they are gonna be back. I laughed so bad when they announced the coming back. Later on when i was reading the comments, i was suprised that our beloved community has such a low sense of humour.

Take a deep breath and meditate over this mantra:
I love GOG
I love GOG
I love GOG
I love GOG

GOG loves you too :)

LOL going from a beta to an @ version ... ROFL

Thank high powers the download is working ... or is it ?

Please, release hogs of war ! your are allright GOG (if you do)

I guess lots of people are making a private archive now :) Not so trusting anymore I guess after the stunt.

I will wait a bit and make my archive later when the rush stops.

Also gog is still fine since no drm, what about steam for example? That could get hairy :)

One lesson here is that you really should have all your games downloaded. Having had first hand experience of companies that have gone insolvent (which luckily hasn't happened in this case), I made sure all of my games were downloaded and backed up.

The real lesson, and one that everyone should consider, is that if one of the DRM infested services such as STEAM went down because Valve go bankrupt (don't kid yourself - it has happened to bigger and better companies than Valve in the past and will happen again) you will lose access to all your games. At least with GOG we can play them even if the service goes.

I was upset when the service "died" but mainly because I hadn't bought everything I wanted to - not because I didn't have working copies of my purchases.

It's good to have you back GOG.

I feel like this should not be the lesson. Or only partly. Its inefficient to download all the games at all times and archive them. Its much more efficient to store them somewhere central with backups and guaranteed access.

I think, the games backup storage should maybe be separated from the rest of the activity or a guaranteed uptime of 60 days in advance be guaranteed. Obviously GOG promised that data is not lost, but people did not believe them.

If this is the conclusion that people will draw from the PR stunt than the stunt backfired because that would make part of GOGs service (download anytime) useless, decreasing the benefit of GOG.

Just my 2cents.

This hoax was a Bad Idea.

Totally unprofessional. Not all of us have unlimited and free bandwidth, remember we sometimes have to pay by the MB so must spread downloads out over weeks and months.

Lots of new customers, at the expense of existing customers. Hope it was worth it.

Lol @ the "lessons" people take away.
All is as it was told before people misunderstood what they meant, though the signs were there. We can dl our games again, our games were active even during the downtime thanks to the no-DRM policy unlike other services where if they pull a stunt like this you cannot play at all, and gog has a new form. How were you actually affected? Did you buy a game just before it went down? Well, shit happens, the downtime happened for a reason and the "hoax" was just the reason it went down for, not that it went down at all. A delay for 2 days is hardly a big deal. Gog is no more likely to shut down after this stunt than it was before. Maybe it was an eye opener to some of what exactly digital distribution means, and why no-DRM is a good thing, but most sane people were already aware so this changes nothing.

This whole thing made me smile, from the hoax as it was to the hilariously self-righteous and outraged responses of people for whom the word "joke" clearly has no meaning.

The internet has a phrase for this which I believe is "butthurt"...

As people have pointed out, all publicity is good publicity and this certainly generated some buzz.

As it is I can understand the need for downtime for this. If the site architecture has drastically changed (yes, even if it still looks the same to you, don't be so naive) then there is no way to just switch over without any downtime at all. Should they choose to use this opportunity to pull a prank and generate some publicity then so be it, some people round here need to loosen up.

Moving on: is it just me or GOG is not sending purchase confirmation e-mails? Also, bring back GOG Downloader!

guys, I think we shouldn't be (that) pissed anymore

(I have exactly 50 games, and at the time of the beta I only had the installer for 3 games, so I was pissed too, and first very sad for gog.com)

Okay this PR stunt was the worst gog.com could pull, it was not really funny, nor clever, it was just lame/wrong/fail/whatever.

But now that we know it was just a crappy stunt, think a little about it :

These guys have no marketing skill at all and have no idea how their users would react to their decisions.

That mean when they'll decide things, they won't be "subtle", they won't fool us with an excellent marketing skill like most other company do (= "Hey Look At That Super New Feature ! Online Community, statistics, achievements and more !", when they're just adding intrusive DRM requiring constant internet access).

That PR stunt proved 2 things for me :

- the guys behind gog.com have no marketing skill at all

- the guys behind gog.com are still passionates and gamers


That PR stunt felt like it was made by a bunch of highschool modders on their first project, not giving a damn about being "professional" and "maximising profits in the next 6 months", and to me it's a good sign, a very good sign.

(But don't do that again gog.com :P)