Sunday 19 September 2010

.... psyche?

So, Good Old Games has a 'we're closed' sign hanging on the front door.

i've not actually PLAYED the games I bought from them, mind, but I still liked having them there...

And I'm baffled, too, because I got the latest promo emails from them this week. So... huh?

Even more odd - there was literally ONE DAY between them eagerly exhorting people to buy their newest game and a vague farewell message.

# Thanks for the support everyone. Hopefully everything works out for the best! 9:38 AM Sep 17th via web

# Sometimes it's really hard being DRM-free... hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy :( 9:25 AM Sep 17th via web

# So how you like us now? :) Age of Wonders and Codemasters Pack promo (Cannon Fodder, Perimeter...60% off) announced today http://www.gog.com 8:55 AM Sep 16th via web

# That's not all! We went crazy and we're launching a great Codemasters Pack 60% off promo today!!! http://bit.ly/9UTZiM 4:24 AM Sep 16th via web

# Wonderful News as Age of Wonders Wanders to GOG.com http://gog.com/y8p 4:11 AM Sep 16th via web


There are rumors that this is some kind of crazy marketing stunt to intentionally get people upset so that they can ride a press buzz onto a relaunch.... but it's just rumor.

As expected, it really was just a PR stunt. I am not linking their stupid video because I'm too annoyed to watch even a silly video with monks in it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Man that sucks! I'd recently paid for a huge bunch of old strategy games I wanted to try out and had only downloaded the smallest ones (my connection isn't that fast). I was going to try downloading a few more this week. Darn.

GOG was a good service, so I hope they're not gone. Half their wording suggests GOG is refurbishing their site, but the other half suggests they're closed for good. It's baffling.

Unknown said...

And it turns out to be one of the biggest bass-ackwards marketing stunts I've seen. Sigh. If I were GOG I'd hope they've attracted a lot more eyeballs with wallets attached with this stunt, as they've lost an awful lot of their goodwill. Deliberately deceiving your customers for a cheap stunt seems so wrong from every perspective.

As a classic games enthusiast I'll still check out their service (I've still got to download all my stuff!), but I'm now only likely to buy games I especially want that I'm prepared to download immediately. I used to be a sucker for buying games on their weekend sales while they were cheap thinking I could download them much later - I'm not inclined to do that anymore.

So yeah, weird marketing all round. I'd like to see if they do pick up more sales from this or whether this is a sign of the beginning of the end for GOG.