GOG's Marketing Gamble

Good Ol' Games recently exited their (two year) beta in a very duplicitous manner, by pretending or insinuating that they were shutting down, only to relaunch a few days later with a revamped website.

Opinions of the stunt cover the spectrum from 'marketing genius' to 'f*** off and die'.

Someone started the requisite thread on the GOG forums asking: Did GOG.com’s PR Stunt Succeed Or Go Too Far?

Copied below is my contribution to that thread.

Yes.  It did both.  It 'succeeded' in the sense that it garnered the attention they were seeking, but it did so at the expense of the very people whose loyalty, enthusiasm, and good ol' fashioned money had allowed the service to even prosper in the first place.

Some are lauding it as a clever 'low budget, high impact' marketing campaign, but I would counter that it was only 'low budget' in terms of immediate capital cost.  What they may have saved, monetarily, was bartered against the collective good will of their existing patrons.  And that's a dangerous trade.

Attention is not the only currency that should be used to measure marketing.  When the true ledger is eventually balanced, some attention-getting schemes just aren't a smart bargain.

I've been a GOG member from almost literally day one, and I'm not at all impressed with this stunt.  In a few short days they burned through a huge amount of the surplus faith and affinity I had towards them.  I hope it was worth it, I really do.

I'm still here, and I'm not going to stop buying games from GOG, and that's another facet of the 'success' of the stunt - it wasn't so heinous that it burned the bridge with me (though I'm sure it did for some).  But going forward, when I buy games from GOG, I'll be doing so not because I genuinely like GOG, the way I did before.  I'll do it because they remain the least evil option in the war of hostility and exploitation being waged against game consumers.  They were always that, and it's the core reason why I rooted for them and will continue to root for them.  But for now, anyway, they've become _just_ that.

The sting of being treated callously, of being staked as collateral against the promise of greater market share, will take a good long while to wear off completely, if it ever does.

GOG is become like the politician that you believed in, but whom you discover has been cheating on his wife.  He may still vote the way you want him to vote, and wave the ideological flags you want waved, but you can't be proud to support him like you once did.  Something was lost.  Trust, perhaps.

And some will surely say (and already have), "pfft... you're blowing this way out of proportion.  This wasn't a big deal.  Get over it."   It wasn't a big deal, true, not in the grand scheme of things.  But it revealed something real that disappoints me nonetheless.  GOG demonstrated its willingness to wager us in a bet for growth and media attention.  That's changed my opinion of them, possibly permanently, and the change saddens me.

[edit: I attached an image from the GOG forums that I felt hilariously summarizes the whole episode.]