You know, it's surprising to me seeing the Daedalic CEO or whoever that was at GOG's last conference which was streamed live, GOG gave their upcoming game Deponia 2 a big promotion, and now not so long later they have effectively given GOG the finger, they release their games on Steam first and if we get them it's weeks later (in the case of Memoria) or lately it's been almost four weeks since Goodbye Deponia launched on Steam and we haven't seen it here.

What's the deal? Did they expect to be selling millions of copies on a platform which is admittedly quite small compared to Steam? It rather pisses me off as someone who wants to play the final Deponia adventure without having to buy a DRM'ed version, not to mention Daedalic's upcoming RPG Blackguards which will probably launch a month behind Steam (if at all).

What is the deal.

Enigmatic hints points to Goodbye Deponia being next week's release. No idea about why Daedalic treats GOG like this though.

Daedelic is just making sure the crack-makers have something to occupy their time before the pub releases the DRM-free version out in the wild.


Or something like that. In other words, no idea. But hey - at least we get their titles here at some point. For those who don't buy anything on Steam, it doesn't really make a difference.

I think it might be an indicator of what platform sells the most copies for them. Nothing more, nothing less, just business.

No, if this would be the case nobody would sell games beside of Steam, beacuse every digital retailer would sell less copies.
Goodbye Deponia can be bought from Steam, Gamersgate, Greenmangaming, Gamesplanet, Gamefly and so on. It seems that the only GOG is not allowed to sell this game.

I still remember the Keynote with Carsten Fichtelmann from Daedalic and his big speech how important GOG is and I really like their games. But they threat GOG and GOG customers like third class...

Steam might give them a better deal or some other perk. Maybe they have a slight preference for DRM, or see DRM Free as value added content bonus after the initial release. ????

Edit: Other retailers are selling it DRM Free? That's a dog. Maybe GOG itself is delaying the release strategically, for some reason.

As I already posted in another Daedelic-specific thread, I think they are just not OK with the pricing system on GOG.com. They want to max out the profit from the regional pricing in the first few weeks. There are various stores already that offer the game DRM-free in Germany, but they all have regional pricing which means the games are more expansive than they will be here on GOG.com. Higher prices means more profit, especially in the first few weeks. Sounds reasonable to me at least.

I think I can wait another week until Goodbye Deponia here on GOG.com.

Perhaps in the era of 100$ box retail games, but certainly not in the current era of digital distribution, when selling your games cheap and with lots of sales actually results in more overall revenue. Gouging the "hardcore" adventure game market, or really any niche market, is the road to failure, it's the reason distributors like Steam rule the market while sites like Matrix Games gouging the "hardcore" strategy gamer market are nobodies.

I don't see how that's relevant to which platform gets the games first. The only thing I could really think of is that they are afraid that the DRM free GOG version will be available on torrents within minutes while it may take a few days or weeks with the Steam version (although as far as I can tell even Steam releases only need a few hours). Of course there's a slight chance that it's about the additional money they get from Steam due to regional pricing...

Although there's of course also a chance that the developers make changes until the last minute and they can instantly release the game with these changes on Steam while GOG will spend a few days doing QA, manually preparing the installer and the extras etc.. Who knows how long it takes GOG to prepare a release when they have a particularly busy release schedule or other projects going on (like the Insomnia promo - I presume that it did take quite some time and effort to prepare the thing, both legally and technically).

It diverts customers who don't care about distribution channel to purchase the game elsewhere, like Steam. While per a single game it makes no difference, in the long run it is wiser to establish a customer base at Steam, which allows regional content and pricing, rather than GOG where you have one-for-all pricing and no regional content.

I think some people have been complaining about the German language option, or lack of it, when using Steam this is one of things that can be easily managed using a single distribution platform.

And also, it may or may not be a factor, but managing several distribution channels increases the time and difficulty of legal stuff & paperwork, it also makes accounting more complex. So unless there's a MAJOR incentive (read profits) to be gained from an extra distribution channel, it may be preferable to actually have only few selected ones.

Sometimes less is more.


Having said all that, I have never spent a single cent on Steam, and they will be missing my business, like LucasArts did with the Monkey Island remakes.

We're talking about release dates several weeks apart (before the first promo on either platform), not sales strategies in the long run. And there's a good chance that the slight boost they get due to Steam's regional pricing may have quite an impact on the revenue during the first few weeks.

Hahaha hooboy. Yeah. Pretty steep over there. Been wanting to pick up both the Harpoon and Steel Panthers big packs, but that ain't happening at $60+ for 20-year old games, even with updates and map packs.

Aaaaand back on topic....

As long as they release the games also on my preferred "platform" even if it is weeks later, I'm fine (and I guess I would be fine also if I got them DRM-free from e.g. in a Humble Bundle). I'm unsure if GOG considers it a problem, or whether it is partly also due to GOG itself (ie. changing the game to "GOG installer" format etc.).

As long as they don't refuse to release their games on GOG (at all) and don't go bad-mouthing GOG in public, I've hard time seeing it as "hate".

I just want to emphasise again that Deponia 3 is currently not Steam-exclusive. You can get the game already DRM-free in nearly every shop, except for GOG. Even the boxed version is DRM-free available in the stores. This clearly indicates to me that it has to be the regional prices as they remain the main difference to all other shops the game is already sold at. No Steam-specific copy protection or update system.

A price strategy where numbers are more important than the actual unit price is certainly important in the long run of distribution, but I think we are looking at full price sales in the first few weeks of a newly released game here. Daedelic certainly know the break-even point for their software to judge whether or not it makes sense to limit the software to regional pricing within the first weeks. For example, Point&Click have always been big in Germany and Daedelic heavily depend on the German market. This also seems to me the reason why you rarely find German versions of their games here or they come to GOG later, not from the start at least. They want to squeeze out as much as they can from the regional pricing I think. Easy as that and I do not have a big problem with it, as long as the game comes to GOG at some point for sure.