Looks like a nice arcade-ish stealth game, and it's also one of those rarely and elusive games with a female protagonist. Definitely going near the top of my wishlist.

Game looks nice, appreciate the release. Unfortunately I don't get close to meeting the requirements currently. And beyond that, happily not going past 10.7. This'll be one for my pc in a month or two...

Ha! I lived many years in Austin, just down the road from S.A. I have now lived many years in Seattle. Everything is always more expensive in Seattle (and SF and NYC and LA). ;)

Do US citizens pay their sales tax separately when purchasing on GOG? If GOG's own FAQ is accurate, then US prices should include sales tax too. By the way, in Europe, VAT is mentioned on receipts as well. This isn't that different in Europe either if you analogically compare European countries to US States.

I nominate TheJadedOne for Post of the Year.
Socialists have no excuse for being upset when they get the bill for their socialist state. I only hope this new congress shall manage to undo the march of socialism through our own nation, before we have our own VAT.
States can't levy taxes on interstate purchases, and the federal government has yet to do so in this case. Our intenet video game purchases are tax free. (If I were to go to the store and buy a game it would be at an 8.75% mark up from the list price.)

What the heck are you talking about, you dimwit? Are you really that thick or just trolling?

I wonder sometimes.
I'm quite glad I'm not American. :S

Monaco in 3D :P

So here are a few things about the VAT regime that shed some light on why GOG is doing what it is doing. The main difference between VAT and sales tax is that VAT is levied on each part of the production & retail process - from the moment of buying raw materials, through creating the product, and finally to shipping and selling it to final customers. With game development, the processes is shorter and simpler, as you have a development phase and a retail phase. So why doesn't GOG publish prices without VAT included, in order to avoid confusion? Because it has to, by law. The main reason is that not everybody can register under VAT laws and hence receive the benefit of VAT reimbursement. In most cases, you need to be incorporated (or be a sole proprietor) and pass a minimum revenue threshold. This doesn't apply to most final consumers, so there is no point giving them the pre-VAT price, because they have to pay the tax, whatever they do.

Of course, receipts in EU often given what part of the final price is VAT and what product costs. However, European legislators believe that consumers should get the final, effective price outright, which I believe is only a good thing. Those of you who live in Europe may remember how a recent decision of the European Commission made airline companies, especially budget ones, publish final ticket prices rather than their previous practice of advertising flight costs without airport and luggage fees (which were in the small print, naturally). That was made in order not to mislead customers, and it is the same approach with VAT. In the US, I guess it's not economically effective, or simply not a tradition, since sales tax is levied at state level, so you theoretically can have 50 different sales tax rates. Not that much different in Europe, to be honest, but I guess the US is quite traditional in some areas (the system of units, anyone?)

Thus, the example above which took account of the different VAT rates in Europe was very well picked; you need to account for tax levels before arguing whether the final price is unfair. Unfortunately, some discrepancies still exist, which is why GOG is trying to make up for it. Personally, I would prefer there to be no regional price discrimination whatsoever, except when accounting for different tax rates (which GOG cannot change). However, when I compare GOG to Steam, there has been considerable progress. Mind that some publishers are still quite uneasy with the whole DRM-free requirement on GOG, so removing that is a feat totally on its own. I can only hope that GOG will continue to work for upholding its core values and convincing publishers that they can afford not to discriminate regionally. It's better if someone tries, even if unsuccessfully at first, then not try at all.

GOG staff are of course welcome to correct me, but I doubt GOG is collecting any US-state sales taxes. To the best of my knowledge, no US state requires (and they lack the jurisdiction to require) any out-of-state company (much less foreign ones) to collect state sales tax if the given company (or one of its parents/holdings) is not physically located in the given state. (California is the worst though in terms of trying to stretch the meaning of "physical presence", and I wouldn't put anything past them. On the flip side, many businesses apparently get out of collecting such taxes using legal loopholes.) I am not aware of anything that would prevent GOG from collecting US-state sales taxes (and submitting them to the corresponding states), but if they were doing that such tax collection should show up explicitly in one's purchase billing. (Otherwise you end up with double taxation when the individual pays their tax because they did not see that GOG already did it.) I can't say if such a thing shows up on GOG, though, because all of my GOG purchases have been made from a state with no sales tax. However, I spent most of my life living in a state that did require sales tax be paid on out-of-state online/mail-order purchases, and not once did any out-of-state business collect the tax.

I can't speak for every state (I haven't looked them all up), but it's definitely true for some (I cite Washington State's website below), and generally (maybe with some exceptions) I would expect states that have a sales tax also require tax be paid on out-of-state purchases (where no sales tax was collected at time of purchase). (In my previous state it was right in the standard tax form everyone has to fill out -- i.e., one box for total out-of-state not-already-taxed purchases, another box that you fill in after multiplying by the sales/use tax rate, another box for adding that into your tax liability.)

Note that "Do US citizens pay their sales tax separately when purchasing on GOG" is an entirely different question than "Are US citizens legally required to pay their sales tax separately when purchasing on GOG". Even for people who are legally required to do so, it is my understanding that compliance is pretty poor. (Credit card companies AFAIK do not report your purchases to your state, nor do the businesses you purchase from, so the states really have no means of enforcement and simply depend on the honesty of their citizens for this tax, that and go after "big ticket" items where they have a "hook" such as cars which must be licensed by the state. People do have to attest via signature to the accuracy of their tax forms, for what it's worth.)

Interesting. Does VAT show up as a separate item on your GOG purchases?

That depends on whether or not different customers (with different VAT rates) are charged accordingly. If they are not, if they are instead charged the same price then the tax paid per country no longer corresponds to tax benefits per country. E.g., if you have one country with a VAT rate of 10% and another with 25%, the tax payers from both countries are both paying the same price for the same goods (and have therefore personally contributed the same tax), but the tax benefits are rather disproportionately distributed. (I mean, one could "say" that one paid 10% and the other paid 25% and vary the base price accordingly to make it add up to the same total price, but I would consider that just fiction.)

As I mention above, they actually can (and do). They can't legally require the out-of-state business to do the collection (as they have no jurisdiction on such businesses), but they can legally require their citizens to pay sales tax on such purchases. (Though they call it a "use tax", but it's the same tax - same rate, only applies when you didn't already pay sales tax.)

But don't take my word for it: "In most states with sales taxes, people who buy goods online (or over the phone or through the mail) from another state are subject to a Use Tax. They are supposed to keep track of everything they purchase and pay sales taxes when they file their tax return. Many consumers either ignore or are not aware of these requirements, and states say it is difficult to enforce."

Or pick a state. (I've randomly picked State of Washington for this excerpt.): "When is use tax due? ... Goods are purchased out of state by subscription, through the Internet, or from a mail order catalog company. Many of these companies collect Washington's sales tax, but if the company from which you order does not, you owe the use tax."

(Note that the "Many of these companies collect" part is news to me. Back when I lived in a state with sales tax, none of the out-of-state companies I did business with collected the tax. Not only are most businesses not required to do this collection, my understanding is that most businesses really don't want to do it because collecting the tax up front negatively affects sales.)

I disagree. There is a very good reason to give the pre-VAT price (pre all VAT if multiple stages of VAT were collected), and that is transparency. I.e., how much of what the customer is paying is actually going to pay for the product, and how much of it is being eaten up by taxes. We need more transparency in this world. If people could see the true cost of government (not just VAT, but everything), they would revolt. And that's exactly why governments like to hide taxes in every nook and cranny and disguise it as everything but a tax.

And once the citizens revolt, the "because they have to pay the tax, whatever they do" part also becomes revealed as false.

(Note that showing the pre-VAT price and VAT breakdown does not preclude also showing total price. It would be good enough for pre-VAT price and VAT to show up in checkout and email "receipts". Total price would be good enough everywhere else on the GOG site.)

Hey, don't mess with our computer-friendly base-2 system of volume measurements! (OK, some of this is English not US, but I believe in using only the best of everything.)

ounces, name
------------------------
32768, tun
16384, butt or pipe
8192, cask or hogshead
4096, coomb or dry barrel
2048, strike
1024, bushel
512, kenning or pail
256, peck
128, gallon
64, pottle
32, quart
16, pint
8, cup
4, gill
2, jack or jackpot
1, ounce or pony
1/2, tablespoon or mouthful

Those computer-illiterate mentally-handicapped metric folks are still counting on their fingers! Base 10 is for losers! ;-)

(And don't get me started on megabytes meaning 1,000,000 bytes making any sort of sense at all. Next they'll be saying there's 10 bits in a byte. Maybe 20 if they start using their toes. That's right Frenchies - 20 bits in an "octet". That's what you get for not just sticking with "byte"!)

Except that is not what GOG is doing. GOG is not taking a base price, adding included taxes, and then compensating customers based on a difference between that sum and what is actually charged. Rather GOG is compensating directly between base price and the price charged, ignoring the VAT included in price charged. Even without GOG doing this, the prices for this game already favor EU customers over US customers (by partially subsidizing VAT). GOG adding store credit to those "poor unfortunate EU victims" just makes this bias in favor of EU customers even greater, turning a partial VAT subsidy into a 100% subsidy.

I can agree with that (i.e., same base price for everyone, but everyone pays their own taxes so their total price would only vary due to their taxes).

Though my real beef here isn't with price differences, or GOG subsidizing VAT, or GOG giving store credit, or EU people getting better deals than US people. The only reason I bring any of those things up at all is to point out that their whining is just wrong - and it's the whining that I care about. I want it to stop so I can read a damn release thread without 50+% of the posts being nothing but this whining demanding that GOG switch to an even more regionally biased system (even more biased in favor of EU customers than it already is). The fact that they actually think they are in the "moral right" on this argument just makes their whining all the more grating to my ears. But I don't hold a lot of hope in getting through to them. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his personal economic situation benefits from his not understanding it.

If the whining doesn't stop, then I'm likely going to just stop reading release threads. Any chance for other goggers to sell me on the merits of a given game will be gone. GOG loses potential sales. On the up side, it will save me a few minutes a day, and maybe slow down the growth of my backlog.

Basically yes, the same as for e.g. X-Wing and Tie Fighter (for me personally the current prices are a bit too high, partly because I've already finished both games before; now replaying my original versions). I have some kind of rough mental image how much I am ready to cough up for a certain kind of game, depending how interested I'm to it. E.g., I'd probably pay more for Among the Sleep than Marvelous Miss Take, even if the former is reported to be quite short game. Then again, I can't be sure which I'll grow to like more in the end, this is just how I see the two games right now.

By the way, I am one of those people who don't mind paying the higher EU prize, if it really is only due to local VAT. To me the difference (that I don't agree with) comes if the publisher gets a bigger cut per unit from EU, than from some other area. For instance, I don't think the low Russian prices have anything to do with the differences in VAT. The differences between EU and US might.

But even regardless of the lower Russian prices, I still will buy the EU version, as long as I find the price agreeable. If a game costs me $5, I don't care that much anymore if a Russian can get it for $3.

Do you have a reference for that? (I would flat out say "you're wrong" if this were a US company selling games to the EU, but with GOG being a EU company doing some funny business IIRC with Cyprus, and VAT being the weirdness that it is, I really don't know, and I'm not finding any helpful info.)

Even if what you say is true, the Cyprus rate is 19%, which means to get $20 the dev has to charge $23.80, which really doesn't change the outcome much. France, Germany and Poland would still be getting charged $1.20 less than that, and would therefore still be getting a better deal than US customers. UK was already getting charged $0.10 over the US price due to rounding to the nearest ".99" pounds, and that would change to $0.30 (though rounding starting from $23.80 as opposed to $24 still yields the same exact price in pounds). US and Australia would still be getting charged ~$20 because neither has VAT. Really, all of the points in my original argument still hold even at the Cyprus rate. So, what was your point? You had a point, right?

So, any reference to Carmen Sandiego is occasional, yup? XD

Looks like a stealth singleplayer version of Commandos, in a good way

artstyle is nice as well

This shapes to be a very nice game and I'm really surprised nobody mentioned anything about the soundtrack, as this seems to be a quality one, a la Mocean Worker