Cav's Place

This will be a quick one, but I just want to point out that the GOG.com Winter Sale has started today, Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics also being offered for free for anyone who grabs them during these first 48 hours of the sale, the games needing to soon be removed from the catalog due to issues with the rights holder. This caught me by surprise since, even though a teaser was released yesterday, I was expecting another regular weekend sale first, with the Winter Sale only starting next week, most probably Tuesday, so I didn’t yet get a Paysafecard PIN and am therefore relieved that nothing I particularly want is among today’s special deals.
Yes, what I said above means that, as of last week, they finally added a payment option for those who either need or simply prefer to use cash, as well as for those who don’t want to give personal financial information away. According to the comments, those who actually tried to use this option faced some problems over the first few days, but I haven’t seen any more complaints lately, so let’s hope the issues have been sorted out by now and I’ll actually be able to finally make an actual purchase from there, after probably some three and a half years of nagging them about adding more options.

Another recent announcement was that they now offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so anyone who purchases a game from GOG.com and finds that it doesn’t properly work on their system despite the fact that it meets the requirements specified on the game’s page has 30 days to ask for a full refund if a solution isn’t already listed or quickly found by their support people. In addition, anyone who somehow purchases a game by accident or simply changes their mind about it and therefore doesn’t actually download the installer has 14 days to ask for a full refund as well. This is an unusual policy for electronic sales, and it’s also something that may quite easily be abused, especially considering the lack of DRM, but this only makes it one more reason to praise and support them in every way possible.

To quickly get back to the sale itself, it seems like it may require a few explanations, so I’ll say that, as I understand it right now, on top of the regular discounts for nearly all games, each day will feature a recommended bundle deal, a “community deal”, which includes a number of games that may be purchased at a greater than normal discount even individually but oddly enough is named as such even though it seems that the other deal is the one the community gets to vote on, and three secret deals, users being able to choose between a classic game, a new game and a random game to receive a greater discount for. To make it clear, each user is only able to select one of the three secret deal options per day, will only see which game is revealed after doing so and not everyone who made the same choice will benefit from the same offer.

Later correction: No, the “community deal” is actually the one the community gets to vote on, but the games available in it don’t have to be available with the same discount even separately, seeing as both today’s deal and the options for tomorrow are bundles.

Even later correction: The “community deal” seems to clearly be a bundle, the first day being the only exception, while the games in the “recommended deal” are available separately for the same discount as well.