GOG head: massive discounts 'bad for gamers'

GOG managing director Guillaume Rambourg shared a shockingly controversial opinion: there's a downside to Steam discounts. "Heavy discounts are bad for gamers," Rambourg told Rock, Paper, Shotgun. "If a gamer buys a game he or she doesn't want just because it's on sale, they're being trained to make bad purchases, and they're also learning that games aren't valuable." The all-too-common phenomenon of spending more money than you want to just to get everything that's on sale in a particular week is "not good for anyone," he said.

If, like us, you wonder at this point how this attitude squares with GOG's own weekend sales, Rambourg explained: "Our average sale tends to be around 40% – 50% off; that's plenty of incentive to pick up a game if you're interested or if you just think you might like to try it because you're not sure about the game, but not some crazy 75% or 85% discount that damages the long-term value of a game." Of course, if you want to get extremely technical about it, the majority of GOG's business is selling $6 versions of games that cost upward of $50 when they originally came out (twenty years ago).