Good Old Games has built up a tremendous amount of good will from the gaming community in the two years since it launched. Offering classic, out-of-print, DRM-free games tweaked to run on modern computers with extremely reasonable $6-10 price tags was a brilliant way to get nostalgic PC gamers to fall in love with the company. Now, GOG may have piddled most of that good will away due to a spectacularly ill-conceived PR stunt.

GOG.com disappeared Sunday, with the cryptic message, “This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.” As a result, users who didn’t make local backups of the games they purchased were effectively locked out for days, and it seemed like they would never get their games back. Earlier, GOG announced that it was all a marketing gimmick to promote the end of its two-year “beta” cycle and the launch of the newest version of its service.

It was a spectacularly ill-conceived and poorly-executed gimmick, and one that may have alienated many of the service’s customers. GOG has released a half-hearted mea culpa for the stunt, saying they would like to “apologize everyone who felt deceived or harmed in any way by us closing down GOG.com without any warning and without giving access to your games.” All considered, GOG really should have just gone with a press release and a service outage warning for the upgrade.

GOG 2.0 launched Thursday September 23 at 8:00 a.m. EST.