Whew, I finally managed to get through this thread. A few things I noticed along the way:
iippo: yet i just makes no sense. Pulling a product from shop to increase its sales. rrrriiight. Economist logic at action again.
They're protecting their other markets. These markets are likely to be larger than GOG, in which case it would make economic sense to pull out. There's also a chance it will give them a better negotiating position with GOG in the future. They're playing the long term game. GOG are asking an awful lot of publishers here:
1. Risk an industry precedent of remove regional pricing from all older titles, and lose the nice padding being collected in various markets.
2. (
Nordic example): Administrative headache. They probably tell their distributors "the minimum price is 20€ or $20 or £20" and it would be fixed for a quarter or a year. Suddenly this model is broken, and they need a whole new process / infrastructure for standardising all prices with exchange rates. This will take some time for them to figure out IF they even opted to do it. Currently there's no incentive for them to do this unless GOG is a major portion of their market, since all this hard work would only achieve reducing their revenue (see previous point).
3. Due to currency conversion, you'd end up with weird prices like £20.02 instead of £19.99, which has a psychological impact of selling less and making less profit overall.
4. (
Frictional example): Suddenly having to pay VAT on a portion of their GOG sales. Once a site is processing payments in local currency, it's no longer an unregulated import; it's now creating local paper trails. VAT is designed to be added at checkout, but governments don't mind as long as it's paid. GOG are asking publishers to pay it.
tokisto: They started from nothing and look what they reached today. So I firmly right they will stand and keep growing. Nordic is losing here today.
The quality of past decisions isn't indicative of future decisions; otherwise successful companies would never fail through bad decisions, which we know isn't the case.
StingingVelvet: publishers should be able to charge what they want. You shouldn't tell them what to charge. Let the market decide how proper the price is. The consumer is in complete control in a capitalist system. If GOG users thing 6 Euro is too much then they won't buy, and Nordic will reconsider their pricing. Steam can charge a $ = Euro price because people accept it, don't care, and know it's the same price as in their local shop anyway.
I upvoted you for your insight, but I think it's a little idealistic or incomplete. First, there are no truly free markets in practise. Various forms of regulation are required, else bad things tend to happen. Innovation killing things like monopolies. Illegal things like price fixing. Some markets are simply ignored because they're either too small, or there's technical limitations like cross-border IP addressing.
This post is proof the market does not always adapt.
Or for an alternative perspective: if it's a "free" market, then we should be able to vote with our wallets, right? But they are using regulation to prevent us shopping freely for the best price, artificially inflating prices in certain regions. Even though we're not wealthier over here, we still fork out U.S. price + 100% on a regular basis. Why? because of a precedent created in a local economy then artificially maintained in a global economy. Given wealth is very similar, and the only real difference between the two regions is precedent, would you point over here as proof the U.S. price precedent is too low? No, it's much more reasonable to say the industry over in the U.S. is healthy and profitable, therefore the prices are reasonable. "It's worth what people will pay" is open to a very wide margin of manipulation.
Davane: Things are not good on GOG.com - it seems they are losing more and more classic games, while shifting towards a more steam-based indie model.
Well, losing old games is obviously not good, but as they've almost tapped the stock of old games, they do need new games to sustain their growth as well as propagate their no DRM cause. See subheading "Why does GOG.com need to offer newer games at all?":
http://www.gog.com/news/letter_from_the_md_about_regional_pricing Gersen: What I wonder is: if Nordic was ok before with the old "
same price in dollars for everybody", if it wouldn't be possible for GoG to continue selling those games in dollars only, it would still follow their "fair price" policy.
Upvotes, but you are assuming Nordic are
still ok with it. Perhaps they were kind of unhappy with the $USD thing already and hoping to get
more control in future. You also assume
GOG is still ok with it, but they may not want to make this an option, opening the floodgates to more publishers and undermining their whole principled stance and PR/sales strategy.