And a very stupid stunt, at that.

It guaranteed that I would never buy anything from them ever again.

Its a good stunt in the sense of sending commandos loaded with blanks to storm a national monument and take hostages and have the police come for several days before announcing that it was actualy a bit of fun. hahahahah... no.

Some people don't like being decived or lied to. Trust is important to them.

Does that make sense?

Oh I am not upset. I would have to care a lot more about GoG to actually be upset. I am still not purchasing from them in the near future though.

You are not purchasing? Again I must ask why. They didn't lie or deceive anyone. The internet deceived themselves. Maybe they should have been more specific, but it was the people on the internet who invented the lie that they were going out of business, not GoG. I have never bought any games from GoG, but this whole stunt has nothing to do with it. I just find the backlash GoG is getting to be hilarious and uncalled for. By the time of their 3rd update it was blindingly obvious that they weren't going out of business. I thought it was a good publicity stunt. I just don't get why people are bitter about it.

Actually they did lie. They were running a sale at the time, and people who bought stuff suddenly lost access to it. They said it couldn't "continue as it was."

Then what happened? Exactly the same thing came back, only now it was "out of beta"? Bullshit. They weren't in "beta" while taking peoples money for product.

This was an incredibly poorly conceived marketing stunt that revealed them to be run by a bunch of amateurs. I've got zero interest in doing business with people like that.

Ugg, a lot of pain in this thread.

Did no one seriously see it for what it was? It was very carefully worded to be both suggestive but vague. The fact that they were going to make a future announcement through Facebook and Twitter certainly hinted at the fact that it was a marketing stunt... And they technically were in beta, no matter how stable and polished their site was.

I'm not saying it wasn't in poor taste, or misleading. It was some pretty blatant attention-whoring. But nowhere did they lie, and I am more than a little surprised at just how offended some people seem to be. I certainly won't stop using their service. It is, by far, the best place to purchase older titles.

They offered a service that people paid to use, and they denied the use of it for for a time without warning or explanation; therefore some people are unwilling to use it and turn to better providers of the service. It is similar to say if a phone company suddenly had all phone lines die and only after it is fixed do they tell people that they had decided to replace some old lines. Now, providing game downloads may not be as important as being able to make and recieve phone calls, but both are examples of distasteful business practices. It is a black mark against their record and people will re-evaluate if they feel the the company in question is still better than the alternatives. And some people have decided the price, selection, and quality of GOG service is not high enough compared to other similar services such as Impulse to be worth putting up with stunts like this.

Exactly. When you're providing a service that people are paying for, your customers have every right to expect some professionalism about things like outages.

Instead we get amateur hour at the local high school.

I've never bought anything from GoG and I wasn't effected by the stunt so I have no emotional investment at all. But I have to say that the place where they crossed the line was taking down the site and not letting people have access to the product that they had payed for. At that point they decided that they were willing to hurt their customer base in order to make a more effective marketing stunt.

Now I'm not going to say that it was such a horrible act that I'd never buy from them. But it does cast them in a bad light and the people who are upset have every right to be.