I'm not impressed. I've been looking at GoG for awhile thinking about buying, but haven't done it. This behavior just screams unprofessional twit, and it does not make me want to give them my business which would be, admittedly, small. I have certainly stopped telling people about them as I don't trust them at this point.

IMO they should have posted some "normal" downtime announcement. Something like this recent Steam announcement:

Our physical server move is complete, and we've lit up the new servers we've added to the Steam back-end. The last step is to do some migration that, unfortunately, can't be done without downtime.

To perform this work, we'll be taking Steam down for four hours on Monday, September 27, 2010, starting at 2000 (PDT, which is GMT-7). The Steam Store, Steam Community, matchmaking, and leader boards will be down for the duration of this event. The forums will be up.

Sorry for the inconvenience -- we know that the extended duration of the downtime is problematic for our users, but occasional downtime for maintenance is unavoidable.

Whew... I just now heard about this from reading this thread. When I first saw it, I freaked. I love GOG and would have been very disappointed to see them close up shop. I like and use Impulse, but I prefer GOG. However, in my opinion, it was poor PR on their part.

No, at least I didnt recieve any email from them.

As a GOG user, I wasn't bothered by this. I have my games, DRM free, saved to my hard drive and backed up. I can still play the first Fallout even though their site is down. Would I be able to play Civ V if Steam went down for an extended period of time? (Yeah I know, offline mode... whatever).

I will continue to support them since I am also a proponent of their main tenet, no DRM. I won't be playing Civ V or New Vegas, two games I have looked forward to for over a year because of Steam.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are looking at this the wrong way. Instead of being upset that GOG went down for four days, they should think about what would happen if Steam went down for four days. Or four weeks. Inconceivable? Well what happens if? As I said above, I had a copy of the file and was able to install on my new machine.

The stunt was a little juvenile. So what? These are the people that care about games and want as many people playing them as possible. Four days down shouldn't have hurt anybody using their service. There is no loader, you can install from the downloaded exe file. I did with Fallout while the site was down.

As soon as their site is back up, I will be buying Baldur's Gate, even though I already own multiple copies and Age of Wonders. Why? Because GOG cares enough to make their games work on Windows 7. Right now I am hating how BG works on my XP machine and wasn't even going to try in W7.

There are so many games on their site that I wanted to play, but never had time. I will make time now and discover (and rediscover) some of the magic that drew me to computer games in the first place.

If you haven't tried GOG, do it. The games are inexpensive. They work. And once you have them, they're yours.

And there is my first post in over six years of being a member.

I'm also not bothered at all by this.  Yeah, it wasn't the best idea for a publicity stunt, but GOG is the *best* digital distribution platform in many ways as it does give us everything that PC gamers have asked for: No DRM, reasonable prices and great titles.  The only thing they don't have is current titles but they are filling a wonderful niche!

A bad PR stunt is hardly enough to drive me away from GOG.  That's nothing!  Draconian DRM schemes?  Buggy/unfinished releases?  Shorter/smaller games to milk DLC micropayments?  Regional overpricing?  etc...  *THESE* are things that would make me consider ditching a digital distribution system or publisher.  But, c'mon, a bad PR stunt has people up in arms when the actual business offering is so good?  That's just looking for something to complain about.

I for one am happy it was just a misguided PR stunt and they haven't gone out of business.  I'll be buying more from them for sure!

There's two ways to handle something like this:

1. A professional downtime announcement, like what Steam did.

2. Pretend to be closing, cause a lot of people to be worried that they just lost access to their games, and in general act like nitwits with no idea what they're doing.

This thing was a disgrace. I especially hate how they mention "oh we're ending beta now!" They've been quite happy to take peoples money for years without mentioning that the service was in "beta", whatever that means.

I'll never buy a thing from such a shady and poorly run outfit.

Baldur's gate is now on the games list.  Also you could contact them when it was down to get your games.

$9.99 for BG1 + Tales of the Sword Coast. Don't see BG2 up on it yet.

Dont see what was the big changes that needed a complete maintenance. They've only changed the layout a bit and added some worthless "mix" button.  Their community area still is borked, and their downloads and overall site are slow. And no, it's not because of everyone downloading their games.

windows seven support runs very sloooooooooooooooooowly

Can you explain this? I'd like to know what the problem is.