Well fuck...

I haven't played it yet, but the reviews are fairly terrible (saying it's very buggy and not in the spirit of the original games). However a few reviews say that the expansion was redone by fans to remove the bugs, and it's cheap enough that I figured "What the hell?" and bought it anyway just so I wouldn't doubt myself later wondering what I missed. It's probably safe to skip, but if you're really on the fence then it might be worth buying just in case it turns out to be decent.

There was no 'coming back'. They were already offering 'fairer price' compensation before they even did the Back to Our Roots statement. In that statement they simply committed themselves to doing it for all future regionally priced games (for the time being at least). There was however no change in the intention to release regionally priced games on GOG. In fact it was specifically mentioned they were going to 'do their best' to get fair pricing (which they already said in their original statement), but in the end it was up to the publishers. They just worded it better that time.

I've never seen a statement that they wouldn't pursue future deals like that, and given the current situation of the Daedalic games being regionally priced now, if they did say it, it would have been a lie, so it's doubtful.

Hmmm, I could be misremembering. I'll try another avenue of search.

Ok, the Back to Our Roots was what I was remembering. Point two to be exact. Are they offering store credit for Daedalic? If so, that seems as fair as they can manage and they aren't going back on anything. They did say they were going to go on a time average and not try to be currency speculators in their pricing, so the local currency price would probably fluctuate within some percentage bound (5-10% I seem to recall being mentioned in comments by GOG folks) being above or below as the exchange rates changed, and that seems reasonable. With still offering the ability to pay in US $ for those who have better exchange rates than public that seems to me like more an attempt at fairness/convenience than greed.

There is currently a blurb on the news post for this thread stating that they're having trouble with currency display and still working out the kinks. My judgement about how they are handling this will be reserved until they have more time to get the site working as they intend. I don't really trust them as much as I did before all this rolled out, but I'm willing to wait and see how they handle it before judging. I've seen my share of rollout mistakes at work in various jobs that made intentions look very different than were intended.

I don't believe they'd ever said that. Here's the "Back to our Roots" post which says this:
We will adamantly continue to fight for games with flat worldwide pricing. If that fails and we are required to have regional prices, we will make up the difference for you out of our own pockets. (...) This will apply to every single game where we do not have flat pricing, such as Age of Wonders 3, Divinity: Original Sin, and The Witcher 3.

In other words, "we'll do our best, but use regional when necessary". For whatever reason (good job TET I guess) many people seem to have read that as backing out of regional pricing with those few exceptions, which clearly is not the case.

I also have typically defended GOG as I did not see previous changes as seriously affecting the catalog - and as long as they continued to bring games for sale DRM-free I was happy. But I have to express my disappointment today.

Losing games from the catalog is never good, but losing this many is NOT a good sign. Especially when most of the games are from a publisher who was one of GOG's biggest supporters. If Nordic games can't agree with GOG on carrying their titles imagine how this will affect publishers who were thinking about GOG but were on the fence.

And movies? 35 games will be gone but a few movies are added and that is an "improvement"?. I thought this was a game store? If I want to watch a movie I will go to Netflix who already do a great job at that particular segment of entertainment. Despite what the news post says, I really don't believe all kinds of major classic movies and TV shows will be appearing.

I came to GOG for classic games and DRM free games. Having less DRM-free games is a negative for me. Oh well, most things I really enjoy on the internet eventually do things which lessing their appeal. Why should this place be any different?

Oh, and the new site design broke the video and screenshot area in Safari 5.1.9. Don't tell me that the website only supports OSX 10.7 now too.

I guess I see that the way I see some of the "see price in cart" prices on websites. Some of the sites are just being jerks, but others are selling for a price that they cannot advertise due to agreements with their vendors. If GOG offers immediate store credit but has to advertise at the regional price, so that someone buying 2 regionally priced games could buy the first one alone and then use the store credit on the second one (and then have another store credit), that seems like an honest attempt at fairness to me. Their first announcement was just regionally priced and too bad. If they're offering store credit they're either paying out of their own pockets or have negotiated a different price with their vendor as long as they don't advertise it (or a combo).

Hence why I call it 'Fairer' pricing and not 'Fair pricing' as they're calling it.

If there's a new $40 game, and you have $40 and I have $40, you can buy the game but I can't, because I'll need ~$54 to buy the exact same game. Sure, I'll get 'store credit' back for the difference, but that's not fair pricing anymore.

Granted, it's head and tails above not getting compensation at all of course.

That said, in the end they're introducing regional pricing. Allowing the publishers to release regionally priced games. They're just covering the difference out of their own profit margin (pretty much nulls profit for EU/AU I imagine, however in return they gain sales from all the other regions + a better catalog).

For anyone who's against regional pricing this is giving in, as the publishers get exactly what they want. GOG's simply softening the blow for us. It also remains to be seen whether they'll continue to do so in the long run.

Is this because rich countries want to pay the same price as poor countries? If so, you entitled cunts can fuck off.

Of course. o_______o

I guess I just see the store credit as inherently more bounded. If Steam sells that same game as $40 vs $54, I'm assuming that the publisher isn't taking the same cut for both and Valve gets $14 extra profit (I'd expect between $0 & $7 extra for Valve). So that being the case with GOG offering store credit for the difference, there's some degree of difference that's too high for them to cover. Sure, the store credit comes back to them so a $14 store credit costs them less than $14 by some amount, but there's still an economic point where they have to just not offer the game.

As a note, I could also see an argument for taking tax differences into account. For example, US has a sales tax (which is taken after the price) but no VAT (which is included in the price), so I could see price parity between the pre-tax part as fair too. (Granted, there's no Internet sales tax yet for the US, I'm sure it's coming as more and more commerce shifts to online sales.)

I totally agree with your post and I can't say about Silver, only that I bought it because of the reviews.

greedy scumbags maybe?

Yea this is only the beginning of the new pricing. I'm a little worried about what's going to happen tomorrow, or weeks/months down the road. Losing a game here or there is one thing, but 35??? That's a little startling to me.