TheBitterness: /snip rationalizing...
dirtyharry50: Making a blanket statement that many people who are unhappy about this are idiots, all excuses aside, was uncalled for. It's as simple as that.
Do you think that European and Australian customers who will be gouged with higher prices should be happy about this or upset about this?
Do you think that people who believed this company's management when they went on and on about how Fair World Pricing is a "core value" of this company (see videos linked in regional pricing thread) should not be upset when the company now tosses this so called core value out the window? You really should see those videos if you never have before. They made quite a big deal about how wrong regional pricing is and how important it is to treat people fairly, as human beings, etc., etc.
Do you not recognize how insulting the announcement was as typical marketing bullshit where bad news is delivered with a headline of "Great News!" and then goes on to inform that some are about to get screwed on price since we no longer respect our core values that we've previously made such a big deal about?
You may not agree that any of this matters personally and considering that your prices will not be affected it is even easier to not care about any of this. Maybe when they dump the DRM-free core value you will care about that or maybe you won't if the excuse is suitable to you. In either case, just because it doesn't bother you personally doesn't make large numbers of other people idiots for being upset by it.
I kind of get Déjà-vu from all this. Didn't Stardock/Impule go thru quite similar period with all the "Gamers bill of rights", "DRM is bad!" and "we'll never sell our games on steam!". They were (or was it just their director or something) quite vocal about it back then. Then they began give all of them up one buy one basically to appeal bigger publsihers and earn more money. Then they made Elemental: War of Magic and their house cards collapsed and had to sell their digital distribution business to avoid bankruptcy (GOG had similar moment when CD Projekt's former cash cow, the retail business dried up and CD Projekt RED had it's disasterous venture into console market, both around the same time.).
Obviously there were differences. The director, or who ever that guy was, was quite erratic person iirc and seemed to have as many haters as he had loyal fans. Iirc he quite vocally attacked anyone who questioned him or Stardocks products (with his fans fanatically supporting him ofcourse). And impulse can hardly be compared to GOG considering it was primarily US digital distribution service (half of the games only available in US, half of sales only in US and prices favored US and screwed everyone else) and had DRM from day one (althought they tried to make less annoying DRM to appeal both customers and publishers).