Not trying to get thread locked at all.. I've been told that will happen no matter what I do so <shrug>. Remember all I'm asking for is metadata.. i.e. Country of Origin. For example. Atom Rpg is currently on the store, it is a Russian game, as such I won't be getting it. I had to use:

https://ogdb.eu/index.php?section=titleslist&amp;name=Atom+RPG&amp;year=&amp;country=&amp;show=&amp;system=&amp;original=-1&amp;Addon=-1&amp;statusid=-1

,to discover that.

NB: I am not calling for a boycott of that game, nor will I, I believe it is up to the individual to make the choice, but without that metadata, it is harder to make an informed choice.

It would have been nicer if I hadn't had to go there. and instead see a tag with 'Made in Russia' instead.

I never set out to make a point "...concerning the inevitability of contemporary politics in contemporary narrative art." I was just asking for a "Made in Europe" group/tag.

I would leave that to others who have far better brains than mine. I also would add, that discussion is likely to be better served on a Reddit group rather than on GoG.

Mmmm... I wonder how it compares to Underail and Wasteland II (also in GOG).

Atom RPG is on sale? Shit…I wanna buy two copies now. 100%

Well, it may all be moot regardless, at least considering ogdb, which lists Conan Exiles as originating in Norway, which nominally is true, but Funcom since 2020 is 100% owned by Tencent, which in turn is not only chinese, but also suspect of being part of the military-industrial complex of China. This might certainly be of importance, but a country of origin label based on the official headquarters will be misleading, basing this in Norway as it formally is. :(

No just discriminating based on where they live ... same same really.

Really.
And I certainly wouldn't describe it as being about their point of view.
It is about the impact on them, which is very different to a POV.

And is GOG not doing that?
I wonder how the majority of customers feel about this? Do they even care?
If the majority of GOG customers want these country labels, then so be it. But I seriously suspect they don't, and so I am not one that believes in pandering to a minority, not without good reason, a reason beyond politics and bias.

Any negative impact on a developer can also be a negative impact on the customer, maybe not immediately, but often what comes around goes around, eventually.

I honestly don't see the point of country labels, other than in a political context. To focus on them is to admit you are desiring exclusion like behavior. I'm all for transparency, but it needs to be in a sensible context ... have some true value.

Why?

It can be used to choose what to buy too, not just what not to buy. To support someone, not just to exclude (I won't give examples to avoid invoking specific subjects). It's all the more ridiculous, as already mentioned, as the same logic could be applied to any piece of information about a game, things that GOG already made tags for like LGBT content, female protagonists etc. But if anyone argued for the removal of those, they'd be shouted down for "desiring exclusion like behavior".

All this comes down to is that some people think it's better to hide information from everyone than to let people make their own fully informed choices freely, because some of those choices may not be to our liking, and we can't have that! It's a rather disturbing way of thinking, to be honest.

Atom RPG is not a Russian game. Atom Team is a multinational team, they work remotely, they do not have an office, the developers themselves are located in different countries: in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and other countries.

I already explained that in my first post here.
But in a nutshell, if you choose to buy on the basis of country, then other countries are naturally excluded.

Just not the same at all.
Those labels or tags are related to aspects of the game itself, country isn't.

That's an assumption. I certainly don't care about country labels at all, when it comes to purchasing.
So I'm not the one being judgmental.

Being informed or transparent has to be meaningful to have value. I spoke about that in my previous post.

To borrow something from the Village People, and twist it a tad.

What are country labels good for? Absolutely Nothing! LOL

You can put the LGBT tag because one character out of three thousands in the game is gay, but it is not the same as to assign a "country of origin" label to a game unless you are talking about small Indy studio (and even then).

Peoples mention Gog "regional" sales as example that it can be done, but let's look at the "Vive la France" sale mentioned in this very thread,in it we have "Blade Runner Remaster", created by Westwood and remastered by Nightdive... two well knows French developers I guess. The same sale also contains "Robocop Rogue City" created by Teyon who is based in the well know French city of...Krakow, or HOMM3 created by New World Computing, again another very French company.... yet all of them ended up in the French sales so should all those games have "France" as country of origin ?

Or let's take CDPR, they are a polish company... but they have a studio in the US that is working on the next Cyberpunk, so when said game is released will the country of origin for it be "Poland" or "USA", most of the recent patches for Cyberpunk 2077 were made by Virtuos, a Chinese company, so does it means that the game is partially Chinese now ? Should it be partially US anyway because Mike Pondsmith is American ?

But regardless of that today every time you give a cents to CDPR part of this money is used to pay their US employees, so technically every time you purchase a game from CDPR, new or old, or even purchase anything on Gog you are also supporting the US economy via salaries and taxes, so does it means that CDPR should put "Poland/USA" as country of origin for all their games ? And let's not forget that the next CDPR games will uses Unreal engine, like tons of other games, so by purchasing any of those games you are also supporting EPIC, a US company.

Even for Indies, if a solo French dev create a game using Unity (US), purchase some store assets and hire some Chinese dev / artists on Fiverr (an Israeli company) is the game country of origin really "France" and does it really mean anything ?

Without even talking about games devs : Gog, as far as I remember they use Akamai and/or Fastly (two US companies) as CDN, they also pay for Google analytic, so every time you purchase a game on Gog, regardless of its supposed country of origin, some of this money will support US companies anyways, should this impact the label ?

That's why I personally think that such a label it useless except for pure marketing reasons. A country of origin is useful for a chicken thigh because at least it tells you where said chicken was raised following which regulations, but for video game it doesn't really means anything nowadays.

As a consumer, I decide based on a game's content and you should too. Judge by their actions and their releases. Do not be fooled by press release statements.

At the top of my list of companies that everyone should boycott is Number None, and it's not because they are based out of Texas (US.) The Witness was released with puzzles that cannot be solved if you're color-blind and other puzzles that cannot be solved if you are deaf. These ableist puzzles also come late in the game, which means that the most popular storefront (Steam) will never issue a refund as the player would have exceeded the allowed period once they encounter them. When called out on this, the official response was to just skip the ableist puzzles. This is ignoring that to get the real/true ending, you need to do those puzzles.

Ableism is very much a pro-MAGA view point, Even if Number None made a statement claiming to be against Trump himself, it would not change the fact that they share his view point that people with disabilities don't need to be accommodated, even when the accommodation is just to do better and warn people about such content in the future.

On the other hand, IkenFell (2020) and I was a Teenage Exocolonist (2022) both have Canadian developers and American publishers. The American publishers have made their position clear just by publishing these games while being upfront about the LGBT+ content as both are fairly recent releases.

You're taking an agument I made for one thing and applying it to a different problem. I never said anything about the issue of how and based on what the "country of origin" should be assigned (though I'm sure the problem is solvable, wikipedia doesn't seem to have a problem with assigning movies a country, even though they also inevitably have people of various nationalities working on them, are often shot in multiple countries etc.), I was just arguing against the idea that it shouldn't be done at all because someone isn't interested in it, or some people will use this information to make choices someone else will disapprove of.

But really it's both pointless and kind of impossible to have this argument here, and I was stupid for getting into it again. People seem completely tangled up in self-contradictory platitudes about "exclusion", and the topic is inherently political so it's next to impossible to say anything pertinent about it without violating the "no politics" rule, let alone provide a clarifying real world example.

Sounds perfect, where is Atom Team Hq'd? and where do they pay corporation/business tax to?
Do we really have to point out the difference between skin colour, and the conduct of a government of a nation? I see the argument of the mob, overruling minorities.. yeah.. that's exactly why we shouldn't have tags for any category at all. In case it offends the majority of RPG players. (sarcasm)

In context now, metadata is just that. It doesn't hurt anyone, it just helps making buying choices.

If you are really arguing that adding a metadata tag to a product on a digital store that some might find useful. Is somehow excluding a community of people from doing something. You have completely missed the point, and over-reached your counter-argument.

Yes yes, globalisation, blah <sic>. It's not that difficult to research (as you demonstrated) all sorts of ways a product might have labour from one place or another. The key point is, CDPR is a European based company, and its profits are taxed within Europe. The majority of its staff are live/work in Europe. Therefore purchasing from GoG or purchasing a CDPR product will benefit Europe more than any other part of the world. Which is why I am happy to buy any CDPR product on GoG, even at full price, and even if I already had previously purchased it on another, less good platform.

Similarly buying a product from a US based developer, benefits the US more.

I want to maximise what I spend on European goods and services, and lessen/eradicate goods and services from Russia and the USA. Why is irrelevant. I would venture that I do exactly the same in every bit of shopping I do in the supermarket. I will chose a supermarket that offers local produce over any other. Why? because that is what I choose to do.

Everything I buy is marked with a country of origin/manufacture EXCEPT videogames. That is the problem. Not my buying choices.