Yeah, you and several billion humans don't spend money on GOG for several reasons, ya snowflake.

I'm glad to see some positive posts about GOG. Sometimes it looks like the community wants the site to fail.

I think that's one thing that GOG is doing very well, because of the "fair pricing" compensation. If your regional pricing is higher than the base price (US), then you are given back the difference in wallet funds (this is the case in my country). So, unless you were planning to never buy anything else on GOG again, in the end it's like there is no regional pricing. If you're in a poorer country that happens to have a lower regional price... well, then good for you. It doesn't really affect me.

It's not like regional pricing is something new. When only physical copies were sold, prices weren't the same worldwide.

The concept of "one world, one price" looked good as an ideal, but sometimes you need to be pragmatic. I believe this was a compromise that had to be reached as part of publishing agreements to be able to bring more games to GOG. It's better to have those games with regional pricing (benefitting some people, and being neutral for others) than not having the games at all.

GOG is the only one who doesn't participate in the world-wide scam of $1 = €1 by compensating you with store credit. That alone makes me happy to buy games here as I will not support a daylight robbery that Steam and most others do with pricing.

I can't talk for others but once my game gets released (not sure if it will be approved on gog yet, we'll see), i'm going to be using regional prices to allow people in poor countries to get the game cheaper. That's what i call fair.
You have less money, you pay less. It's only natural and imo, the best way to counter piracy.
Make your game easier for people to get.
For instance, people in south america don't have as much income as in the US. Why should they pay something that represents a third of their wage for a video game ? I'm pretty sure their beer, bread or fruits are much cheaper.

Take Brazil for instance. They have a minimum wage of 240€. How do you think they could buy a 50€ game ? But if the game is at 10, then they have a better chance of getting it. At 3, they'll get it (for cheaper games that are 10/15€).
Does that seem fair to you that, because they live in another country, people don't have access to the same entertainment you do ? Or is what i explained much more fair ?

But then, you have stupid:
https://www.justpushstart.com/2013/05/activision-increase-game-prices-in-brazil/
80$ for a game in a country where that's 1/3 of their wage. Sure Activision, nice move lol.

I understand that reasoning even though I guess that others may not call it that fair, if only because there are poor people in rich countries too. In the end, it's not the countries that buy games but the people in there.

However, that's not what GOG is doing anyway. For example, Russia is not the poorest country in the world, still it gets the smallest prices. Regional prices on GOG or Steam only correlate loosely with the wealth of the region.

The idea of regional pricing is to maximize profits by adjusting the price so that profit is maximal. That's about all of the idea behind it.

If this is also fair or rather not is highly disputed, I would say. Often enough it is seen as very unfair if two people have to pay different amounts for the same thing. it being good or bad very much depends on the circumstances although I would say that fairness is not the goal of GOG or Steam anyway.

The price compensation of GOG probably goes in the right direction, but I don't think it makes a big enough difference. For example, prices on Steam could still be lower in total.

No it's not. I'm not sure why you think it is. Gog doesn't dictate prices. Publishers / devs do. They set the price.
Gog does compensate with wallet points, which is pretty damn good of them to do.
However, I was refering to poor people based on their country. Because there's no point in having games priced at a third of someone's monthly wages. Games should be made available to people at the same kind of ratio. People from rich countries will thus pay more, yeah. But even the "poor" in richer countries have more money (comparatively). Unless we're talking about homeless people, of course.

If people think it isn't fair, they need to think twice about it. Paying the same ratio of gameprice / minimum wage seems the fairest way to price a game, to me.

Yeah, but in that case you would need much more regions than there are at the moment. Even within countries there are severe differences when it comes to income. In my city in Germany the average income is only 50 - 60% of the average income in Germany. So why do we have to pay the same price? Same goes for Russia for example: Average income in Moscow is much higher (even on par or higher with some poor regions in Southern Europe) than in rural Russia. Why do they have to pay the same price? And like Trilarion already pointed out: Russia isn't by far the poorest country in the world and yet they have to pay the lowest price. What about countries in Africa or some in Asia?

And please don't start with "minimum wage". There are countries without minimum wage and others (like Germany) where there are so many exceptions from minimum wage that the only ones who profit from it are the ones that don't need it (because they already earned more).

Like Trilarion already said, this isn't about fairness, it is about getting as much money as possible.

But yeah, the fair price package from GOG is nice and as far as I can see they are the only store that offer such a deal.

I think it is because GOG is a business, owned by shareholders (via it's mother company CDP). Businesses usually think foremost about their profit and not about charity or fairness. That's also the idea behind regional pricing. They don't do it to make the world more fair. It could be a side effect, except for the poor in the rich countries which clearly get screwed.

They never advertised the introduction of regional prices as something to make the world more fair. If anything with GOG it was the opposite. Before, they always insisted that worldwide flat prices would be the most fair thing. Then they made a U turn.

My trust in the natural greed of businesses tells me that money and profit is the underlying driving force in almost all cases and also with regional prices. Maybe I'm in for a surprise and there is a surprise altruistic force at work here, but I doubt it. I don't believe in it.

Russia gets the lowest prices because it is probably the country with the highest levels of piracy in the world. If the games were offered at their usual prices there, nobody would buy them at all. That is why they are severely underpriced there so at least some people buy them. They know higher prices would be pointless so they try to squeeze out at least some profit instead of none.

Moral of the story - pirate until they yield. :)

Sir, i'm afraid you're mistaken.

:D whatever
Is not about old-new look.

Is about how the store functionally work well for selling games.
Possibly the old website was functionally superior and better fulfilling the core business of selling game.

In the end we'll never know, as GOG will not post sales figure before/after the 10th year restyle.

GOG has officially disavowed the "Good Old Games" years ago. It's just plain GOG, stands for nothing.

Good Optimized Games came to my head just now.