I hope it's not the only release planned for today...

Me 2.

This is nice enough but sorry for lack of enthusiasm.

Hmmmm... sorry, maybe it's just me but WHY should we do this? We (maybe) have bought the game and now you will give us the soundtrack, art book and whatever for even more of our money? Where's the time when gog.com used to give us freebies for every game we bought and it was standard procedure to get wall papers, avatars and the soundtrack with the game without paying extra for it?

I mean really, now in the digital age when we do not get a nice box for the game, printed manuals and maybe a map and other physical goodies, now when we receive the possibility to download a game (which after production costs you almost nothing to provide besides bandwith and servers) we are expected to pay for the goodies which we have received free in most cases until now?

Sorry, no deal, I would rather buy another full game for USD/EUR 9.99 than pay for an "upgrade" ... just offering my opinion, those of you who do have the money and really want these goodies, just go ahead but don't be surprised when companies will continue to make you pay more and more for half finished games plus DLCs (which might make complete the game after the third or fourth of a series of DLCs and of course additional payments)...

Unlike the Rainbow Dragon I have no issue with paying for a little extra content if it includes a FLAC soundtrack. Often you pay more due to deals and revenue sharing with the musicians who made the music. Or in some cases (not saying it is necessarily in this case) you are getting content that original backers got and paid more to get.

The free content that GOG included in the past was whatever the publisher of old games had rights to and on hand. These days since the games are new you have musicians / composers and others who all have a momentary interest. Apparently they have this strange desire to put food on the table and keep a roof over their family's heads.

Hell if you don't like the price you can always wait. Everything goes on special eventually and you can be smug in knowing that those who buy early are helping to pay for what you get cheaper later. Win / Win.

....and realise that maybe you should not have waited quite that long as the game is a bit too fast for the eighty year old you ;-) but hey, it was cheap!

That went out the window ages ago. I guess publishers/devs figured there was an untapped revenue stream there and decided not to allow this stuff as freebies anymore.

Everything is monetized these days - it's ironically one of the side effects of digitization. It's far easier to monetize the shit out of everything by breaking it into bits and pieces and microtransactioning it all to squeeze out every last penny. Welcome to our glorious new digital world.

Are you sure folks that complain like that aren't already 80 they always sound like that in my head, "In my day GOG gave you a new CPU with every purchase."

Hehe! I was born in the sixties... and GOG promised cake, not CPUs. I am still waiting for my cake... :-)

"Charging money for wallpapers"

You know, just because this industry getting away with more nickel-and-diming than ever before "doesn't bother you" doesn't mean you should be proud and accepting it with open arms.

I dont mind spending money on OST.... but alas Everspace OST felt dull.. 5 hours in and just turned on my music player and ride on.

48 pages artbook and wallpapers? Yeah could skip those.. blame DDDA digital artbook for spoiling me.

I don't see the problem with this. The games business economy is totally broken these days, games are too expensive to produce and sell for way too cheap, almost none of them will ever turn a profit. The games that GOG gives out lots of freebies with are mostly the classics, who are already long past their main sales period. But these are recently produced games, where selling goodies might still make the difference between the studio being able to make another game, or shutting down.

Look at paid extras like this as a way to send an additional Thank You to the developers, in return for a few goodies. Like upgrading a Kickstarter pledge, because you want to see them make more games in the future. The extra content was not removed from the game, regular players don't miss out on anything by not buying it, which is what people (rightfully) criticise about some other DLC practices. So it's the best of both, isn't it? It's a package for the fans, without nagging everybody else.

The expensive part about producing a game is not the box, CD and manual that we no longer get. It's the months and years that several people spend of their time, not being sure whether their baby will ever sell.

And about the price… the full soundtrack is in it. What do you pay for a full music album on Amazon or iTunes these days – about the same, no? Sometimes I really feel like the digital world has distorted a lot of people's sense of what work is worth. Musicians need a salary too, contrary to popular belief =)

It's a nice idea! I wanted to do something like that for the games review site I planned, which never panned out. For games I'd review that I thought were good, I'd hand out an extra copy or two to site visitors :)

On the other hand, some people might like the kind of stuff that's in packs like this (otherwise they wouldn't complain that they used to be free). An artbook is something I'd personally rather have in print, but I'd absolutely pay $10-20 for a soundtrack I really liked.