As for the "two price points, flat pricing" etc. that xyem complains about, they were never a biggie for me so I can live with them gone. After all, I happily bought games from e.g. DotEmu and GamersGate, which I think had different pricing regionally, at least €=$.

As for GOG selling also newer games, I'm only glad they have expanded there. Thank you GOG for breaking that "promise" (if they ever really promised to sell god-awful old games only anyway, which I don't think they did)!

I'll worry about DRM in GOG only if and when that would ever happen, and then I would vote with my wallet. I think GOG has realized that those other things (flat pricing etc.) weren't that important for the bulk of their customers to differentiate them from the other stores (mainly Steam, and stores selling Steam keys), but DRM-free is. People who don't mind DRM buy primarily Steam (and Origin, for EA games) keys anyway already now.

Of course in favor of Steam, as they give me what I want. And it's not an opinion, it's a fact.

I won't be the one who decides, buyers and market share will. I don't have to provide a source to cite here, right?

Of course they'd be willing to pay more than the reseller did, otherwise the reseller wouldn't make any profit at all. :P

Seriously though, I get what you're saying, but speculating "what if" won't lead us anywhere. How much one can potentially save by abusing the system, however, is very much tangible, and that's what the publishers will look at. For those who aren't following the whole regional prices tracking effort, Mrkgnao has summed it up nicely over at Magog: regional priced games in Russia are on average 80% cheaper than the US price (data is at the bottom of the page).

However, it's a problem Gog cannot solve, not without introducing DRM. We all agree that restricting gifts isn't going to stop resellers, so... I don't know, maybe it's just something they want to do to appease the publishers? They sure can't be expected not to do anything about it, even if it's only a symbolic gesture.

I know it sucks that Gog is getting further and further away from what it once was, but have you ever considered that maybe Gog was never about values, but just catering to that share of market that had been left untouched up until then?

I wouldn't like it if they did it like with PDFs where I would constantly see "This copy registered to:" at the bottom of the screen. ;)

I really wish people would read my posts.

Watermarking is annoying (as it prevents things like deduplication) but I don't know why it is considered DRM. It can never interfere with you ability to use the product.. something else would have to be used at the same time.

As you say, watermarking helps identify the original owner of the license but.. that's pretty useless, even as a form of finding out who is leaking it (acquire multiple copies, identify where the watermark is.. scramble it).

It being claimed as a form of DRM in and of itself is bizarre.
But it is productive and it is a valid option because even doing it the manual way, you can get 50 codes every 5 minutes. Imagine you were paid minimum wage to create GOG accounts. That's what.. 200 rubles for Russia? $4 in USD (converted).

In one hour, you could create, by hand, 120 accounts, which is 600 GOG codes. That's 0.3 rubles or 0.006 USD increase in cost per code..

Pretty sure that can swallow that and not notice, even with the worst workaround, it's completely economic to do!

Oops, I think I worded that wrongly. I think it should have been "wouldn't have paid more than the reseller was offering it for anyway".

Sure they can. In the same way they wouldn't introduce DRM, or increase the price, to appease the publishers. We've lost games from the catalogue purely because GOG refused to increase the price. I don't even recall anyone blaming GOG. We were sad to see it go, but proud that GOG stood by their principles.

The conversation should have gone like this:
P: "We want regional pricing"
G: "We don't do regional pricing"
P: "We want it! You won't get our games if you don't"
G: "Fine fine, here's your regional pricing"
P: "People are exploiting the regional pricing and we're losing money!"
G: "Welcome to why we didn't do regional pricing."

And that should have been the end of it. Once you start kowtowing to the publishers, you are going to become like all the other services that do, which is all of them.

If GOG are going to ditch their principles, then I shall do the same in return. I've refused free stuff from GOG because they weren't at fault and it was going to cost them to put it right. I buy multiple copies of stuff so I can play with other people, even when I could give them my copy. Why should I bother to do the honourable thing, if GOG has stopped?

The problem with shafting people is you justify them shafting you back and it quickly becomes a prime example of this is why we can't have nice things.

I'll just chime in to say I completely agree with xyem. While GOG remains my first choice and favorite digital distributor, I'm concerned about the way things are going with them. I actually feel it's only a matter of time before DRMed games appear in the catalog. At that point, I'm not sure if I'll abandon GOG or not (I probably will), but I damned sure won't buy any games with DRM from them. I can get DRMed games elsewhere.

And I think it's rather short-sighted to say 'feature X didn't concern me anyway, so I don't care that they changed it'. GOG has taken several steps down a slippery slope, so it's only a matter of time before they do change a feature or core value that does matter to you. But by then it will probably be too late to say or do anything about it.

That seems really high in all honesty, but I'm not going to waist time checking that... the same things that automated systems have trouble with also slow down humans. Email verification and captcha alone would slow down anyone trying to do this by hand, email verification would require a new email that has to be verified with each account, meaning you would have to take the time to create a new email for each one and then verify that email is real. I don't think GOG does this yet, but I can't remember. GOG could even block those throwaway email providers that are used to get around this by only accepting legit known email providers like @yahoo.com or @gmail.com

Then you factor in payment method, credit cards/debit cards are easy to track... and it's doubtful anyone even in Russia would have 120 different working cards. Even systems like Paysafecard I would imagine don't allow purchases of in bulk cards, and they do have a pin which can probably be used to track fraudulent activity. so this just seems rather unrealistic to me.

But a blend of automated and manual can be faster than completely automated or completely manual. Everything but the capatcha could be automated.. so you just prompt a human to fill in the captcha that the automated system is generating by making new accounts. Don't forget, these accounts can be reused.

The reason I know why it is so fast to create accounts is because I actually did it for testing the repping system on GOG (on willing volunteers only, of course).

Nope, having email addresses created "on the fly" is easy to do. I do it with mine! You can put anything between the xyem and the domain name on my email and I will still get it. Emails can be wildcarded.

gmail.com was a bad choice because, you can create throwaway emails with Google Mail.. a lot of people already do it.

Except it isn't fraudulent activity. Even If it was, GOG could track them far more easily by not having the restriction (just look for the account that buys a lot of gift codes).

They are either already hiding the activity by having multiple accounts, which makes the restriction pointless, or they are not and GOG are going to just make it harder to find out who is doing it, because they will end up having multiple accounts.

I don't really use gmail so if true, then fair point as I didn't know that. Don't you think though, that GOG has had this same discussion internally, and wouldn't impose this limit if they didn't have a way or a plan to track such activity?

It's gifting , it doesn't really effect you at all... this seems really silly honestly when you will get 5 gifts per day, which I imagine for the vast majority of GOG users will be more than fine. Something GOG doesn't even have to allow at all.

It's simple for me if GOG doesn't do what I care about (which is DRM free), I'll leave. But in my view GOG has been the best service I've ever experienced, and frankly it's customers abuse that good service. GOG is a business, businesses expand or they die. GOG was always going to reach a point were old games would no longer sustain their business, and in this industry regional pricing matters... in certain ways more than DRM. But GOG customers don't care.

GOG is winning the DRM fight, the industry is changing.... reverse coursing on that is just simply unlikely at this point. The fight on regional pricing, wasn't something the industry was fine with letting go on. But GOG tried to find middle ground, and still people complain when technically they are getting what they wanted even if there is a more upfront cost.

Why this thread turned into a discussion on GOG's principles instead of the Steam VS GOG thread it was suppose to be I don't know...

Now this is a megathread! Nice one!

Give this man a cookie, spot on opinion, totally agreed.

While I don't hate steam I dislike it on some spots, the hassle it gives when it comes to travelling, the fact that games are not as yours as they are in GOG, mostly immature community, and the stupid fact that I can't buy from them directly since my USD bank account is in the US and I live down in Venezuela, we have a exchange control here that hasn't help my country in any way, it made it poorer in fact, I can't buy with any other currency using my regular Venezuelan bank account.

GOG is clearly superior on the travelling side, you can play and download them anywhere, never ever had an issue buying from them, no DRM at all, freebies and a great community.

There is nothing wrong with adopting Steam ideas that people want or that are popular. GOG in many ways does things much better than Steam. You can do this and remain different.

Based on your other comment, your issue is clearly with your inability to play online with the same copy of a game and two people... which you technically shouldn't be doing anyway.