GOG.com is kicking off its holiday sale today and will be offering discounts on more than 600 video games in its DRM-free game library between now and 8:59 a.m. ET on Dec. 29, the company announced.
To kick off the sale, GOG is offering post-apocalyptic role-playing games Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel for free during the first 48 hours of the sale. Due to the Fallout franchise rights changing hands from developer Interplay Entertainment to Bethesda at the end of this year as the result of last year's litigation settlement, GOG will no longer be able to sell the games after 2013. Players who purchase these games from GOG before the end of the year, however, can keep them.
Three types of daily deals will be offered during the two-week sale. Each day of the sale, registered GOG.com users will receive Mystery Boxes containing free games and other gifts, as well as notices on special sales. Well-known YouTube gaming channels, to be announced throughout the sale, will also showcase games each day with recommendations. Furthermore, the GOG.com community can vote on one of two game bundles to go on sale every day.
All games included in the sale are covered by GOG.com's recently announced 30-Day Money Back Guarantee program, which will refund gamers in full if games will not run on their computer.
Correction: This article originally stated that recommended deals would be 75 percent off and community-voted deals would be 80 percent off each day. The discounts will change every day; we've edited the article to reflect this.
Update: Visitors to GOG.com have had trouble accessing the site and making purchases throughout the day, and according to a statement GOG sent to Polygon, the site is experiencing its "highest traffic ever." A representative for the online retailer apologized for the issues and said that its team is "working around the clock until all the problems are fixed."
Here's the full statement:
We're currently experiencing server issues due to the highest traffic ever noted on GOG.com. We did anticipate much interest in our 2013 DRM-Free Winter Sale, as well as our Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics giveaway, but the number of visits exceeded our highest expectations by far. And we mean FAR. For today, we've prepared double the number of servers that were needed to support our highest day in traffic to date, but it turned out to be not nearly sufficient. We're working on quadrupling our server supply, now.
We're terribly sorry for all the inconvenience you might encounter today, while visiting GOG.com store. If you're new to the site, rest assure that this is far from our day-to-day standards. We're working around the clock until all the problems are fixed, and everyone can enjoy everything we have to offer. If you've encountered any problems, please give it some time. Most issues will be resolved automatically, soon, as the first batch of extra servers is coming on-line right now. If you're affected by something more serious, please be assured that our support team will assist you and fix whatever needs fixing.
Again, we apologize for the user experience, that is not up to our usual standards.