How does that work? Because unauthorized sites like G2A are able to violate several international laws and everyone's hiding in a corner whenever prosecuting them comes up, but you make one ancient DOS game available to WW2-phobic Germany and suddenly that same European commission gets brave enough to take you in personally? I need an explanation on that with all of the legal details you (or GOG's lawyers) can provide.

At most I'd just see Germany trying to fine you and put down a takedown notice, and/or censoring the GOG website with their 3rd rate flammenwall that 12 year olds could bypass.

There is no German Firewall (we're not (yet) China).
But they could force gog.com out of the index of google.de, and this would be really bad for business.

I think in the case of Wolfenstein (banned in Germany) they really have no choice, or they risk a blacklisting, with the above consequence.
In the case of Quake 2+3 it was pointed out somewhere that this was Bethesda's decision. Bethesda is a branch of Zenimax, and Zenimax has offices in Germany. So some malevolent youth protector might take Zenimax to court in Germany for allowing GOG to sell blacklisted games to German without age verification. Those people are no strangers to twisted logic, I tell you...

That much I know, but legally it would be in the realm of the distributor to work that out with the countries and the publishers. In the case of unauthorized resellers they're stores that use ebay/garage laws to distribute fraudulently obtained goods. Germany wouldn't say shit if they distributed it to German users. The issue I had was with GOG becoming criminally liable and being prosecuted as opposed to just being censored. I need a blue to tell me the basis of that claim in full detail.

And on Steam someone can just buy the wolf pack http://store.steampowered.com/sub/418/ and gift it to a German friend/user and they can activate it just fine. So you have Steam distributing this game already to Germans for years that has a buy lock only and not an activation/distribution lock. https://steamdb.info/sub/416/

But since it's GOG suddenly it becomes an issue. This happens every single time and everyone cries every single time. I don't get it. :P

Same on GOG. German users don't have access to the pages of the regionally-locked games, but they can't stop me if I wanted to gift the Wolfenstein bundle to a German user. Then, said user would be able to download and play the game normally.

john I get you, even though I am a somewhat unrestricted American user, but to be fair GOG has not really lost their principles completely. Their initial point was to sell older PC games DRM-Free at a reasonable price with some nice extras and they are guaranteed to work as best as possible. Now the pricing part sadly has been lost and the extras are not as great as they can be, GOG is still providing the best service they can because in the end, they are the business and the publishers dictate how and what they can sell. They have to unfortunately abandon some things in order to compete and so far, they haven't become complete and utter soulless shills for their business, they just had to take in some cons to have the site grow in the best way possible to compete with other digital services.

This recent Bethesda acquisition is a double edged sword of course, it is a shame that Quake has been region locked and Wolfenstein is too but GOG did get some really great classics on here with that too. Seeing Doom and The Elder Scrolls on here is practically black magic considering how DRM centric Bethesda is. Either way, it is a move that has some nasty cons but some positive ones too.

In terms of "law" in general, a number of people miss the point. It is not a static thing. Is it against the law or isn't it? That gets decided when (or if) it goes to court. No real lawyer can tell you exactly what does and doesn't fall under a given law when talking about edge cases with any certainty. Prior decided cases (precedent) helps form the law, and if such existed of the German government suing another online publisher, they could give you a better idea, but I don't believe that has occurred yet.

Clearly, GoG's lawyers and/or the lawyers from the publishers in question have decided it is not worth the risk to sell those games in Germany. Either that or by "flaunting the law", they fear a bad classification for future games. In any event, when big companies decide not to make a profit by not selling games in a particular country, they are doing so for what they see as a legitimate reason. If it truly were not an issue, they would take the money and run.

If you read my statement that you quote, you see I only do for games that been block, not regional pricing. In fact I agree with Here For The Bear points regarding Russian price, even if I have to pay 10X more, as long as I feel the price is right for me I will buy it.

Now, for the block games that I could not buy in my country. Why trading, VPN, or import count like not having bought the game at all?

I don't need to fork out money to buy games to trade? If the game is $20, I offer another $20 game to my trade partner to buy the game that is blocked. If I do not trade with him, he / she would not buy the game at all. So still $20 in the pocket of publisher / devs

If I am using VPN for Russia, then arguable it gives the publisher / devs less money. But if I VPN to US, then there should not be a problem.

Importing sure give the publisher / devs the same amount of money.

So I fail to see what is the problem since the Publisher / Dev get the same money as their intended price.

Well GOG can stop you from gifting to a German user if the publisher demands it, since they have a system in place to effectively enforce regional restrictions similar to Steam by disabling world wide gifting on the regionally-locked games.

I don't think so. Not as long as most of people won't work for ~1€/h.

I hope you don't mind giving up regional earnings as well and make them equal for entire world ; )

Für dich auf deutsch, GOG hat keinen deutschen Sitz und ist somit NICHT an den deutschen Jugendschutz gebunden. Frag bitte bei offiziellen Stellen nach, diese werden dir genau die gleiche Information geben! Es ist total schnurz piep egal ob das Angebot an deutsche Kunden gerichtet ist, wichtig ist der Sitz des Unternehmen und dieser ist NICHT in Deutschland!

I fully respect the OPs position. I think those that are just straight up rejecting his statements are only embarrassing themselves. You may not agree with what he says, but he's not making wild unsubstantiated statements, he's just got a different position to you. I was watching some commentary from TotalBiscuit on something recently (I think it was about a article someone had written), in which he suggested (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) that we should listen to those arguments we don't agree with more than those we do. If we only listen to things we agree with we're just looking to reinforce our opinion without actually exploring the argument. I agree strongly with this view (though would listen to arguments from those that don't :)).

In the case of the OPs statement, I kind of agree too. There used to be a time when GOG said "we sell these games because they meet our criteria of xyz". Now they seem to say "we are changing our criteria so that we can sell these games". This change is giving some substance to the long standing hysteria that at some point DRM free will go out the window too (it won't, that would just end GOG).

While it's quite fair to argue that the games wouldn't be here if it weren't for GOG changing its stance, there are already other places to get games. I didn't join GOG for access to AAA titles because there was nowhere else I could buy them (I actually joined in order to buy Evil Genius, then it just spiralled). It used to be the case that a game coming to GOG meant that the publisher had seen that there was some wisdom in GOGs values, I don't see the new additions as taking that view.

If he wanted to make an actual statement about these issues, then that should have been the point of the thread. But this crazy "outrage" bs with a list of games which mostly never would have appeared on GoG without the changes, does not help his cause...maybe three of those games would have appeared here if GoG stuck to flat pricing.

And it still seems like people forget all about the "fair pricing" store credit one gets...
For each of those games he "would have" bought if it weren't for regional pricing, he'd be getting store credit for the next. In essence he'd be paying no more than anyone in the United States as long as his latest purchase was priced the same. And if it wasn't the difference would have been credited...for the next game he'd buy.

I'm personally sick of hearing about the "regional pricing" boogeyman when GoG "is" still different, because they credit one the difference...

You know, strange thing compromise...devs didn't want GoG to advertise lower prices than their competitors in some regions, but GoG still is cheaper if you take into account store credit. And because of this compromise, these developers are now here...

Neither GoG nor Bethesda is going to risk fine/trouble with German government. You may boycott both of them but I don't think it is going to change anything. The problem lies in government which doesn't care about it, they're just making some ridiculous regulations to pretend they're busy. Actually they're well paid to teach that Hitler was a robot and blood has a green colour.. And nazis? Well, there were no nazis and even if were, they came from outer space.