Destructive nationalist, yes we have that :)
This would be very nice!

So when will we see the updates from the CEO or guys in blue?. getting sleepy here waiting :P

No, VAT isn't really at the centre of the problem at all. Nor are there any of these fictional "legal clauses" that require regional pricing, at least not at the top level. CDPR was forced to regionalise TW2, but that was an arbitrary but court-enforced decision by Namco Bandai.

There is no real legal foundation for regional pricing. Publishers regionalise pricing simply because they want to maximise what they can get away with charging.

It's also a matter of competition. Different countries charge different amounts for games at retail, again based on market forces. The industry has tried to spin this as being a "consideration to their retail partners", but at the end of the day, regionalised digital pricing is motivated by the ability to compete with retail. Publishers charge $100 for a game in Australia not because of respect for retail partners (what's retail going to do if they have a problem with it - stop selling games?) but rather because customers in Australia have no alternative. They pay $100 for a digital game because the alternative is paying the same for a physical copy.

If and when retail should ever disappear, you can say goodbye to daily deals and Steam sales.

I don't know if there's much variation in legislation, but at least around here you must have the VAT, both percentage and amount, clearly stated in the receipt.

GOG is a bit shady in this, as the confirmation mail only says "All prices include VAT if applicable."
Was any tax applicable with my last purchase? If so, how much was it?

Now as long as it's one price for all, it makes no difference really. But if different areas start to get different prices, just saying "All prices include VAT if applicable." is not enough. That does not tell the customer how much of that extra cost was actually required by some law, and how much was ripped off.

As bad as regional pricing is as such, at least some game sellers, like Indie Royale (to name one example, there are others), clearly show how much is going for VAT of the total amount paid.

The no IP proxying has been in the agreement for a while. I still bought all my games with a proxy(US proxy from germany) without problems.
It seems they are only cracking down on regions like Russia where it's extremely cheap.

Still all the crap policies they put up plus the general inconvience and customer unfriendliness of valve lead me to the decision to deinstall steam and never spend another dime on the turd that Valve is.

I'm sincerely hoping GoG will not go down such a route.

Great post man, good ideas and very informative. Thanks and I hope that GOG listen to this concerns of many.

GOG told me this:
"Our main policy is one price disregarding where user is from, it means that because of the inside country regulations about Vat our income from the same title will be higher or lower depending where from user is buying it as we have to cover a proper amount for country of residence. Answering simpler - yes all additional costs are covered by us and send the user country (it more depends from the IP address however then from the chosen location during registration)."
So it seems they charged different cuts of VAT (or none at all).

I really do not think so. It has been shown from the last post-mortems of games how important those sales are for the tail-end of games. And that is for games which are digital only.

Exactly the problem. The only difference is that GoG has a smaller selection of games.

The only thing they have left now is DRM-free. What I'm afraid of is if GoG gets big enough, they will abandon that in favor of more games and more sales to compete with the others.

So how is that letter coming along?

Probably going through many revisions to prevent good-news-syndrome. They would have been criticized for regional pricing anyway, but the attempt at spin made it even worse.

Edit: Corrected typo.

Heh, was predicting last night that this thread won't reach 3500 replies because that other one will be started before then and everything will move to it, but they seem to be taking their time with it...
Not that it matters, I mean it's either (tiny chance) "sorry, we were wrong, there won't be regional pricing after all" or (almost certainly) completely irrelevant bullshit... Yet here I am, wasting my time waiting for it too, if just to see exactly how to word the call to full boycott according to how the bullshit in said letter will be worded, specifically. Assuming no miracles will happen, I mean.

My prediction is that they will announce the name of at least one of the games, to soften the blow a little bit.
I can't think of anything else they could say/do that hasn't already been said by TET.

As I keep saying, that's completely irrelevant. Or, well, just shows what their price is, how much they considered their values and principles to be worth.

It's still a big thing now and part of the reason for this is that many countries still have poor communications infrastructure. Then there's also the fact that digital distributors tend to group together certain countries (e.g. with EU countries generally all being treated to the same Euro pricing)... I'm pretty sure it'll be much cheaper to buy the physical retail boxes in the poorer of those regions & the digital prices will be relatively much more expensive for them.

Digital is chipping away at it each year, yes... but emphasis should be placed on "chipping away". It's not quite as rapid a process as you seem to think. It will eventually be small enough to become irrelevant - but that's not going to happen for quite some time yet. I'm not assuming anything. The physical price does not need to be equal or almost equal to the digital price. Once the retailer has bought stock from the publisher they can sell it at whatever price they like - or even give it away. The publisher has no further control over it.

The digital price, however, must adhere to the pricing that has been agreed to in their contracts with the physical distributors/retailers for each region. You might think that, but no. Here at least, it's normally a lot cheaper to order the physical retail box than to buy through a digital distributor... and usually by quite a substantial amount (£10/~$17)... and that includes delivery. Most retail boxes are very cheaply made anyway and tend to contain only the bare minimum - typically the install disc, Steam key and a leaflet with advertisements for some of the publisher's other games.

Collector's Editions with physical extras are of course much more expensive though. I agree with this completely. It is only a matter of time - and when physical retail is reduced to the point of irrelevance, then we will be able to make some serious progress towards fairer pricing.


This is a good point... in all of the emails and letters I've written to publishers/developers asking about bringing their games here, I've *not once* mentioned GOG's worldwide pricing. It's never been a consideration for me... if a game was released here I'd buy it here almost regardless of its price elsewhere (availability of Linux versions has been complicating that policy quite a lot though). Main points have always been:

- DRM-free
- My willingness to pay more for DRM-free releases
- GOG's support policy / ensuring compatibility for older games


That is pretty hypocritical to be honest... You do realise that by doing this you're both supporting regional pricing and strengthening their main justification for enforcing regional pricing through digital stores?


CDPR was required to have regional pricing on TW2 right from the start due to their publishing agreement with Namco Bandai. The court case was about forcing them to use geo-ip to determine location rather than just trusting whatever their users specified.