Over the years I've bought a few games and DVDs from regions I'm not supposed to buy from. For me it looked like a good deal to get a brand new game for pretty much 50% off compared to what publishers expect to make from guys like me. When I bought those things I knew fully well that regional pricing is a way to stimulate sales with populations that do not have the same expected income as a European or North American worker, and that regional pricing was not a loop hole I was supposed to use to get a comparatively ridiculously good deal on a brand new game. Screw the publishers, right? I was strapped for cash the months those games were released, honest! What difference does one sale make, hundreds of thousands of people are paying twice the amount I'm paying right now.

Then I started thinking about other industries I've seen struggling in the past few years. Miniature wargaming was a tough business for many stores, and home electronics is a cutthroat business that has seen several big franchises go bankrupt in Scandinavia operating at a loss in order to make sales at all admist fierce competition. Both those markets are very dependent on brick and mortar stores, not just for sales but to stimulate the hobbies and buyers curiousity. I'm sure most of you have gone to a home electronics store and felt up that brand new phone, checked out those HDTVs or whatever, then walked out of the store and ordered those products from some discount online warehouse, perhaps even from abroad. Same thing goes for you miniature wargamers out there, maybe you have a Friendly Local Game Store in your town which you go to once a week to play games and chat with friends, flip through the store books and checking out the sprues and blisters of nice looking miniatures, then you go home and order it cheap from abroad.

And then you bemoan that all the good stores are closing. You bemoan that your favourite miniature producers are closing down and their stuff goes out of production. Well, PC gaming hasn't really been able to swing back fully for the past ten years either. Publishers often don't feel confident throwing money at game developers to make PC games for many different reasons, but essentially it has all to do with profit. It used to be that piracy was the big concern and buying or developing awful DRM was the boost of confidence they needed to finance PC game development. That is changing somewhat, largely thanks to GOG and us the customers, I'm sure. Jolly good. There is still the issue of expected return. Profit. When they throw all that money on PC game developers, they do so because they expect to make X amount of sales in this and that region and therefore make a certain amount of money. When numbers don't add up to their estimations, publishers get wary of continued investments, which is often why development studios go bankrupt or get swallowed up by publishers. Sure, we the gamers can buy cheap games today, but in the long run we are only hurting the industry. Without good and calculable profits, there may not be enough money spent on PC development to bring us great, finished and polished games. Games need to sell well in the Americas, Europe, Asia and perhaps even Africa, at the prices publishers expect people in those regions to pay. Failure means the next game might not get the same big budget or perhaps a tighter deadline.

If you want GOG to "ban" regional pricing you are only giving them one option: Stop negotiating for DRM free releases of brand new big title games. If GOG or any other business were to sell AAA 100,000+ USD titles for the same price to people worldwide regardless of what the customer is expected to pay according to the publishers' calculations, sales would be shifted away from brick and mortar stores (which make up a majority of all sales) and other digital retailers, which would only signal that PC games are not profitable investments compared to making a few hundred Harry Potter games for consoles.

Unregulated business will NOT help the future of PC gaming or DRM free gaming, as good as it might feel for a while as retailers destroy each other in a price war to gain the favour of cheapskate gamers who can easily find the best at-a-loss deals while there still is an industry to speak of. We can not expect all great games to be crowdsourced either, thats a pipe dream.

At least I am not really complaining if brick and mortar game stores are closing down, as I don't largely buy physical retail games anymore. Good riddance. Overall I find buying online much easier that visiting a dozen brick and mortar stores to see whether they have the item you are seeking. or to compare prices.

Clothes is one exception. I normally need to try them before I buy, or if it is something like T-shirts or socks, those are dirt cheap in the local supermarket anyway. I don't see myself saving much of money buying a bunch of T-shirts or socks online.


As for the rest of your message, I am unsure what it has to do with regional pricing. Steam has regional pricing while GOG didn't, yet usually Steam had cheaper games and steeper discounts than GOG. But that was fine to me, as I considered the DRM-free GOG version worth more, so I was also willing to pay more for it.

That said, I don't see myself necessarily paying much more for my GOG games either. If I don't find some price agreeable, then I don't buy it, regardless of whether it has regional pricing or not.

I mostly dislike regional pricing and the possible restrictions that come with it because it may make my life harder, ie. if I try to buy some game when I happen to be abroad. Should the local restrictions of the target country, or my home country, be the relevant ones? What if I live in the other country for a prolonged time, even relocate to there? It could become messy.

One-World-one-Price was my personal argument for the GOG-Shop. If regionalpricing become true, there is no longer a argument for GOG.

You and I may not be buying games in these store any longer, but the majority of game consumers still do. You could also argue that you never go to the cinema either and rather pick up the DVD or Blu-ray a few months later. Well, the cinema is still where the short term money is made back, however backwards it may seem. Home entertainment sales take years to outsell cinema revenue.

Publishers will never cause unfair competition between their own retailers. If they were to allow GOG to sell hot new games worldwide at a flat price when all their other retailers are bound to regional pricing they would only be shooting themselves in the foot and hurting the business of those retailers. It will never happen. The only option is for GOG not to sell DRM free AAA titles. Well, they could sell them for the highest costing regional price worldwide, I guess, but that isn't very helpful and I don't think publishers would even bother. That makes sense from a retailer point of view who want to sell lots of different titles. It does not make sense from a publisher point of view which is all about marketing just one big title for the moment. A few months down the line publishers can give a damn about regional pricing, but for a brand new product they want to get the best return from all the marketing buzz, which means no competing against your own products (ie no two competing titles from the same publisher, and no competing against the various kinds of retailers all trying to sell your product).

If that's true, why don't they drop regional pricing after a few years then? I wouldn't have that much of an issue with it if it was only temporary, during the first years - same as with DRM -, although both of these measures would ensure that customers like me would never buy games on release and would always wait a few years for the better offers.

Adapt or die. Times are changing and consumer buying habits are changing. If the industry refuses to adapt, then they'll end up - in the long run - doing more harm to themselves than good. The buying habits of much of the world for many goods is changing from physically walking into a retail store for a purchase to ordering on-line. Games are one of these products. And in an on-line world where you're selling digital goods, regions are just an artificial construct.

I preordered a bike from a local brick-and-mortar store. They gave me the official RRP, an official discount off that, for preordering, and a fixed exchange rate (which turned into yet another 20% off, fuck the olympics while we're at that). An oligopolic brick and mortar store can function without screwing over the customers, news at 11.

You can't compare a digital store with a real store.

If i read your post correctly than you should stop buying digital copies. Cause they are one of the
reasons why brick and mortar games stores are closing.

Boxed games are a rare species. Even i my small town we had 2 stores selling them...both gone,
now you only can find a small selection at a supermarket or must travel to the next larger town were one of the
big chains has a store.

Steam alone has over 75 million user....Theodore Bergquist (CEO from GamersGate) said that *distributer who don't
participate in the current development will become extinct.

The only pro aspect of regional pricing would be if the customer would become a plus....like translation and the
option to play the game in his/her language.
And i don't speak about manuals in pdf (they often read like they were made with google translator).

You make it sound like a direct correlation. I have to buy most of my DVDs from other regions because nobody will sell DVDs in German or Chinese to me here in the US. I have to be extremely careful which DVD drive I use on those discs because I only get to change region on it 5 times. Which effectively means that I require one drive per region.

If these stores were having trouble, they would have had trouble either way. The bigger problem is digital distribution in that region. When I want a copy of a movie from China I wind up paying basically the same rate as I would for the DVD locally, and in many cases I wind up spending more because the movies don't go on sale and they have larger shipping charges.

Also, this is a case of digital goods whereas my experiences are with physical goods. There's basically no good reason to have regional pricing on digital goods other than lowering prices in regions where people don't make much money, and I doubt that's going to happen.

Unless it's the law, or good business practice. At least in the US, digital distribution of software still (largely) falls under the same export restrictions and costs as physical distribution. And to get software vetted for sale in foreign markets will incur legal costs which might justly be recovered by the market that imposed those costs.

Generally I tend to agree with your statement, there, but it seems there's a bit more to fairly consider than just an income-adjusted cost for digital goods.

The official clarification from GOG echoes my thoughts almost beat for beat, though I was surprised the whole back catalogue will also become regionalised (though balanced to make little difference to how things work today).

I used to be an idealist, and it made sense to me that gamers should force publishers to "adapt". Well, now I see that publishers as financers for MOST game development have some leverage too. I don't want to go through another era of shitty games just because publishers think PC gamers are either pirates or too picky and just not worth investing in.

If major publishers can see that DRM free games actually sell and they don't need to invest in proprietary DRM solutions any longer, that's a big step forward for PC gaming. It is too early to ask them to shoot themselves in the foot by letting online retailers destroy regional markets (which they take into account when they decide how much money to spend on a particular IP!) and wasting the release-month marketing frenzy.

DVDs are the best/worst possible example of DRM.

There is no other justification for DVD regions other than maximising profits.* Especially those restrictions are designed to prevent English and French people from buying cheaper North American releases, which have the very same English soundtrack and often also French translation made for Quebec.

But to ensure maximum profits, we have something called Region 1, Region 2 and so on... which are made incompatible on purpose.

Localising costs might make some sense to force price difference, such as German dubbing and Nordic subtitles, etc. But if one doesn't need these, they are not worth paying money for either.

On top of everything, Region 2 releases not only cost more money, but are usually inferior releases than Region 1.

1) Often R1 releases have more extras, which are removed from R2 releases to make room for German audio, or removed "just because". Very few, if any, releases have R2 as the better option when compared with R1.

2) PAL speedup. If the release is originally made for NTSC standard, or cinema, the frame rate difference between PAL and NTSC means that R2/PAL versions will always run at unnatural speeds. This is most noticeable with the audio, where the pitch gets messed up. This can be fixed with pitch correction when mastering R2/PAL, but few releases do this, and even if they do, the video is still running too fast.


So basically, what you are saying, is that if somebody chooses not to support a system which put customers on different continents in unequal position, and makes R2 customers pay more for getting less, and even technically subpar products, we are doing a wrong thing?


* = Yes, DVD regions can be justified by the difference between PAL and NTSC to some extent. However, as 99% of present-day TVs and players can show both standards, this is not a valid reason. Almost every DVD player that is region locked, will play both PAL and NTSC after deregioning.