Romania: $54.99/$61.99 Ukraine: $54.99/$61.99 Serbia: $54.99/$61.99


Switzerland: $39.99/$44.99 United Kingdom: $49.99/$57.99

Are you fucking kidding me?!

All my facepalms, seriously. I mean, people would have to be really dumb to just take this how it is, dangit.

Don't be evil ... seems that the next forgot that fact. I want buy games
not at releasetime, a few weeks later prices are cheaper elsewhere,
first patches out - no need to support this strange pricing politics.

I'm from Hungary too, and I got russian prices in RUB (599/699), wich then converted to USD (16.99/19.99) (see attached images). And I didn't tweaked it at all (in fact, I'm here because it seemed so odd and I tried to figure out why I became suddenly russian). For sanity I looked up from multiple sources (ie: speedtest.net) to see if I am where I think I am. They more or less proved it (greatly failed the city, I think because of my ISP, but the country is right). Then tracerouted gog.com and looked up all of the hops. There was one, wich refused the ping reply, but other than that all of them was from Hungary and Poland. All I can think of right now is perhaps it's some kind of IPv4 block exchange coming in play, wich, after it leaved the NCCs hands, transfered between countries/ISPs (in this case from Russia to Hungary) and gog looks up the IPs from a database maybe from RIPE instead of tracing it back for every sesson, and that's the cause why some of us in Hungary sees russian prices. But that idea seems so stupid, I sure hope it's not that broken :)

I'm in South Africa and I'm getting $39.99/$44.99 right now.

I'm in Canada but have IP addresses in Canada, the US (tunnel), UK (VPN+tunnel) although my normal GOG traffic goes through the regular local link. If GOG starts supporting IPv6 my traffic will go through the US by default, although I suspect the prices are the same in both. UK pricing seems to translate pretty much at the exchange rate between the currencies modulo noise. Not sure I'd even bother with the trouble to try to save 10 cents on a game, or even a couple bucks though

And for The Witcher 3... well, I will be buying that at whatever price to support CD Projekt and think they deserve whatever they decide to charge for it. Haven't bought a big name game full price in 7+ years and The WItcher 3 is the first one to make me want to buy it as such. ;o)

I suppose someone could get a tunnel in Russia, but I'd be more worried that my computer would be infected with 10 million malware/viruses to consider risking doing that, given 99% of the blocked attempts to penetrate my firewall come from Russia and China, and the news that everyone within a 400 mile radius (exaggeration yes) of the Sochi Olympics is having every mobile phone/device/laptop/whatever they have hacked into in mere milliseconds... :)

Naw, I'll pay what GOG's prices are if I think they're fair or wait for them to drop to a price I think is fair for a given game. Gaming the system isn't worth the effort IMHO and if anything only stands to harm the system and end up harming one's own future experience.

Who is your isp? I am using Hungarian telekom, and it registers as Hungary here.

At home I use Magyar Telekom too. The assumption I made above can go with it, because it can be affected with only a few ranges wich are assinged with certain regions in their network to be randomly/dynamically assinged with the end users and/or PBXs with local subnets or whatever the case might be.
I've tested it with another ISP (Telenor), and with that I got the not so nice prices (€39.99/€44.99 and billed as $54.99/$61.99) and that's the same result as a friend of mine got with two other tries (one at MT in another area, one at Digi), so from that it seems to be rare case (although we barely tested anything from the possibilities).
By the way, here in the forum it shows that I'm from Hungary, so there has to be two different methods of location detection, and one of them seems to fail in some cases

So, Russians buy a bunch of gift codes, and sell them netting a profit for them.
Paying less to GoG and the publisher.

Ultimately business is about $, so let's vote with our $.

Or, I could pirate it, and save my money, and essentially vote that way.

And as TheEnigmaticT of GOG said in the big forum thread concerning the subject matter, they're currently trusting customers not to do such things, but if they all of a sudden find that 40% of the revenue from a game is coming from Russia and being redeemed around the world, then they'll be forced to do something about it.

What options does a company have to combat something like that? I can think of a few with varying degrees of success, but one is to increase the prices in the region that is causing the problem, or some game publishers might simply choose to not sell the game in that region and it is only available for purchase in other areas and no longer in the region that is taking advantage of and gaming the system. Another is to flag the account that is purchasing the games as unable to purchase more than one copy of a game, or no more than a certain number of copies per day/week/month/whatever.

If people abuse the system and send the wrong message to game publishers they very well might just pull the plug and consider it a failed experiement and yank the game, or perhaps yank all of their games, then tell all the other companies of their bad experience of trialing DRM-free at the next conference and help to ensure no other companies make the same "mistake".

I'd also go as far as saying that people who engage in such behaviour ultimately must be in favour of DRM because their actions are the type of actions that are responsible for companies creating DRM in the first place to try to limit and restrict people from abusing the system, the copyright laws, or whatever the problem at hand is that they deem to be a problem. This is why places like Steam have region locking and whatnot.

GOG believes that people will buy DRM-free games here instead of pirating them because they offer a good value proposition with what they provide, the bonus goodies, the support, etc. and they believe that people will now buy from them for those very same reasons and they wont need to worry about having to try and prevent people from abusing the system. If people do abuse the system however I believe it is simple A+B=C math that something will be done to prevent it which makes things less favourable for people. They could ban gift codes from being redeemable across region boundaries for example, or the other things I said above.

Why do things to make matters worse?

I would just like to get one answer fromj GOG why is it good for them to sell the game for hungarians at nearly double shop prices? If someone hops in to a close shop and gets it for 30$ why would he buy it here for 55? (Unless of course he is a gog fanatic supporter, which some of us are, sometimes myself included)

Just pure speculation but... I wonder if the logic behind that could be that games wont sell very well there at all and that people who can actually afford to buy them are considered well offs and able to pay more, so they can charge more and make higher profit on lower volume from those who can actually afford it. No way to know that I imagine but I'm just trying to think of why one would charge higher prices for something in an area where people have lower incomes and higher cost of living for example. There must be some logic to it, I mean it can't be to fight piracy or the prices would be lower. Perhaps the people in those countries actually have very low piracy rates compared to say ... Russia? It'd be interesting to see an industry insider spill the beans or someone try to unravel the complex mysteries of pricing not just of games but of anything really.

With this they've started digging their own graves. This is a line better not crossed or shit starts happening. There is no way such decision could be accepted gracefully by most clients as it is not fair for customer. If customer feels it is not fair it does not feel obliged to act fair too and everything goes to play around the system. Then more restrictions come and more playing around is happening. GOG adopts unreasonable regional pricing, people start abusing gifting, proxies and so on. GOG starts fighting with a fire (by more limitations and policing or whatever) and it backfires instantly. In the end they can add DRM as well because more and more people will just pirate clean GOG versions (as having no issues pirated versions might have) instead of buying on GOG. And publishers/developers will not give DRM-free game for release if that bomb goes off. But then again if GOG do that they can as well close their business down or just start selling Steam keys. Matters will go worse and they are the ones who started it, they just do not realise that yet.

FWIW, Poland doesn't use the Euro. Not yet at least. And no, they don't use the USD either, but if they change pricing there in the future it would be from what it is now to their local currency likely which I do not remember the name of.

I'd have to agree with you about that, but only because no pricing system is fair anywhere on the planet on any product. The reason being because we don't have global equality of anything period. People live in areas with dramatic differences in quality of life, availability of employment, wages, taxation, education, availability of retail goods and services, what their local currency is, how stable it is and how it stacks up against any other particular currency and many other factors.

Any definition of "fair pricing" that anyone could ever dream up is riddled with holes because it is only "fair" very loosely in a specific context. If you turn your head even one tenth of a degree to the left or the right looking at that definition from a different perspective whatever the definition was falls apart when considering taxation, cost of living in a person's area, average income, their own actual income, their own situation. And while considering what is "fair" for the end customer, does anyone even care at all what might be fair for the distributor, publisher or game developer? Should the companies that offer products and services be mandatorily required or even reasonably expected to offer their products to groups of different people in such a manner that they must charge one group at a profit margin of 10% and another at a loss of 8% just to produce a profit?

The concept of fairness is tremendously flawed, and if there's one thing that is obvious in life in general, it is that life itself is not fair, and that for every person out there that thinks one thing or another is fair under one circumstance or another, there are going to be other people who think the same thing is unfair from a different perspective of how it affects them negatively. As a result, no matter what GOG does or a game publisher does period, there are going to be some number of people out there who think the current situation - no matter what it is - is "unfair". That includes prior to the recent announcements there were people who thought the pricing and whatnot for them was unfair.

Change doesn't and in fact cannot bring "fairness", at least not in any universal sense whereby after the change you poll every customer that exists and ask them if they think whatever the change was is fair and get a polling rate of 100% of people like the change and think it was fair. Impossible. No matter what the change, there will be people affected by it positively and people affected by it negatively and individuals amongst those affected will decide whether they think it is fair or not and there will be people with opinions on both sides.

Even if they just lowered the prices of the entire catalogue 50% permanently people would find it unfair. It would be too, it'd be unfair to GOG.com, and it'd be unfair to the publishers and developers.

Fairness is a red herring. Life ain't fair and that's a sad but true reality unfortunately. Fact is, this is a change and people fear and resist change and tend to look at change with a viewpoint more focused on how it affects them personally good or bad than how it might affect a larger group or everyone overall. That's a natural human thing of course, but it means that change - whether good intentioned or bad, will be perceived in a negative manner by some subset of people who perceive they are being wronged regardless of one's actual intentions or whether the given change has an overall beneficial result for the masses at large.

Only time can tell whether these changes will end up being beneficial or detrimental to the masses at large, and individuals affected by it will perceive it more in the way it affects them personally than the larger effect it has on all people, some even perceiving it as harmful to them when it might actually turn out to be beneficial to them and they're just making assumptions. I'm not suggesting that will be the case for everyone in any way, but it probably will be for some people, and I've already seen some people react very negatively and then do some research and math and come back and say that they actually end up benefiting from the changes. I've seen the opposite of that too, but that just goes to show that what we perceive isn't always what we receive in the end.

In the end, time will tell and nothing is permanently written in stone. There will be other changes over time I'm sure and those put in a worse situation now might end up in a better situation at some point later on too. Time will tell.