Fair enough. =)
Yes, pre-ordering is pretty risky, usually every game needs few patches at least.

The only reason for pre-ordering that I see is that you have 100% confidence in the devs that they won't disappoint you and because of this you want to support them.

Blind faith is never a good thing.

Still, I'm fairly confident that it is a good game. I mean.. It's a sequel. How bad it can be? Right? Right..? =D

I'ts more or less impossible to communicate that. For regionally priced games the price changes constantly due to currency rate. Do you really expect them to make a daily announcement about that?

Right at the moment many games lost the fair price package because of the weak Euro. Several of them are even cheaper than the US base price for people at the Euro zone. The fair price package you still see are mostly games that had heavy regional pricing from the beginning or that were added to the catalogue while the Euro was already going down.

You see now why I usually don't preorder...

Flat pricing is when everybody pays the same 5.99 USD in American dollars or their regional equivalent, so a Brit would would pay 3 GBP.

Checked again and with the current currency rate (1€ = 1.13$), it's indeed strange that you don't get the fair price package for The Witcher 3. With the 27% discount the game costs €43.79 for me which is about $49.50.

If I'm not mistaken the US base price is $59.99, so 27% discount would mean $43.79 and so there should be about $5.70 fair price package.

But maybe I'm doing the math wrong (I'm not very good at such stuff)?

So I got it exactly backwards. Yeah, regional pricing sucks!

Don't you get store credit for the difference though?

no us discounts differ from eu discounts:

59.99 (full), 53,99 (10%), 50,99 (15%) and 47,99 (20%)

so you have to compare euro price for 47,99 with 43,79€

So I still should get about $1.50 fair price package. I wonder how often they adjust their currency rate for regional priced games.

And it's interesting that they use different discounts for different countries. Does it mean that a loyal US customer isn't as good as a loyal European one? In my oppinion that's even more unfair than normal regional pricing.

Whenever they feel like it. The € has gotten stronger for about 2 weeks now, and yet they have still not adjusted it. Hence why GOG's equivalent dollar price is $46.39, instead of $49.75 (or $49.79, since GOG likes rounding up to 9).

Only the Europeans who have a base €60 price get this preferrential discount. All other countries get the standard 10%, 15%, or 20% discount.

their current exchange rate is 9.99$=9,49€, 1.05~1€. they don't adjust the currency on a daily base. its sometimes higher and sometimes lower then the real exchange rate.

It's becoming really misleading.

It is, isn't it. Thanks to the currency rates fluctuations, and the constant updating of prices, a good chunk of regionally priced games appear as non-regionally priced ones, while the flat priced ones appear more expensive in local currencies.