So I was lucky enough to receive my copy of Rebel Galaxy relatively fast, but judging by the posts a lot of people are having problems/delays in receiving the game.

And there is also this text that appeared in the announcement thread, minutes after it came up:
"Due to technical difficulties, your free copy of Rebel Galaxy might take a while to arrive. Please be patient."

Except that this is happeneing for the nth sale in a row now.

Isn't this something that GOG could have forseen, and prevented before the sale? I understand it could happen the first time (especially since that was after Witcher 3 appearing which greatly increased number of GOG's users) or the second, or the third. But surely by then someone must have noticed it and said "you know what, let's fix it before our next sale."
Unless, since I'm no expert on the technical issues involved, this is something that is bound to happen every time?

And don't get me wrong. This isn't about free games or feeling entitled to them (and to be fair, GOG's support eventually fixes this; I don't think there was anyone who didn't eventually get the game they were supposed to get). It's about GOG looking bad. The whole idea of giving free games is to attract new users to GOG, but that whole purpose is defeated if those people only get frustrated that they didn't get their game on time.
Especially if the game is not "free" but you had to spend $x before unlocking it.

To be honest I imagine a lot of it is to do with how many people are claiming the freebies. The site still isn't particularly resilient to lots of traffic and with the big releases and the sale they must be being hit pretty hard.

Either that or whatever bug occurred wasn't actually visible until lots of people started using the system (so 10 tests don't show anything, but once 10,000 people have qualified you get problems) and because the way the freebies work is slightly different each time the code is presumably not exactly the same for each sale.


But I'd imagine it mostly comes down to traffic and that's why it happens with every big sale.

If they had learned from their mistakes I seriously doubt I would still be allowed in here. :P

But after n sales, it should be easy to predict the amount of traffic they'd get. Nothing really unexpected happened that the increase in traffic this sale should be larger than anticipated (GWENT release might have brought extra people, but again that's something that could have been foreseen).

So if GOG know they're going to get x (+/-) extra traffic during the sale, can they not get extra (servers/hardware/staff/whateverittakes) for those 2 sale weeks? This is a genuine question on my part since I don't know how feasible would it be to accomodate the extra temporary traffic. But given the amount of frustrated customers this is producing, and the fact that it doesn't seem to happen on other sites, I think GOG should do something about it.

Throwing more hardware at a problem is rarely the best solution. Often it doesn't help at all, because the problem is not caused by hardware limitations in the first place. I'd love to go into more detail with the technical discussion, but unfortunately I don't have time right now.

Go and tell this also to Steam! O.o

I thought GOG was more like the Catholic Church - why stop sinning when you can be penitent afterwards and all will be forgiven again? Good News, everyone. GOG has learned from its past mistakes and is trying hard to repeat them in a more agreeable fashion this time around! ;)

Very apt analogy.

FTFY ;-)

So.. what you're saying is that we should throw more hardware at you to get the explanation? Right?

They don't ever fail at repeating them though. ;)

You're still getting your game even if delayed. I don't see the issue. If the game was that important that you need it now, why didn't you buy it before it was a promo gift?

Besides handling server load is never easy. Load balancing, adding hardware, increasing bandwidth, it all takes time and money. It's not cost effective to beef up the system for a situation that isn't that common. The on going costs don't out way the temporary slowness.

GOG isn't Valve, I doubt they are bringing in as much money, let alone Steam dies to server load way more than GOG. So it doesn't matter how big you are, there is always some event to cause issues.

Not the point, as the OP stated. Its "why not fix a known issue"? Same answer as always, cost/reward. It costs money for more bandwidth/hardware/research. Against how many people are really going to be turned off by getting a delay on a game they will likely never play (as they would already own it)? Easy answer.

thanx for bringing a genuine smile !
please, keep being the way you are ! it's a beacon around here...
no sarcasm intended at all

I too am confident that GOG will see to it that everyone will get their promo goodie. There are some issues that I'd love for GOG to handle differently (e.g. the GOG installer issue). For this though, I would say if it saves them a ton of money for infrastructure they'd only need very temporarily and the worst outcome is Rebel Galaxy arriving a bit delayed, I am prone to understand their position.

Haven't followed this issue too closely, but if GOG communicated the delay openly, I'd be OK with being a bit patient with the bonus game appearing in my library.