We're out of Comfy chair. But we do have eggs, spam, bacon, spam, sausage, spam, eggs, bacon sausage, and spam.

Like I pointed earlier, regional pricing will lead to regional locking which will lead to DRM.
If they don't, people will simply use a VPN to bypass it and create an account in the preferred country.
Then the publisher will push GOG to put DRM in anyway to stop that.

With that, all the differentially good point of GOG will be gone, and there wouldn't be much difference between gog and steam except steam do pretty much everything else better.

At that point, there is absolutely no reason to use GOG anymore and most people will stay with steam.

Okay, some words need serious change in the language - I misread this as "Vaginal Pricing".

I agree on the regional pricing point though - much as GOG seems to want to make it fair by providing free games to those affected... doesn't work for me.

Aye but it's been awhile and it hasn't worked out like that ... the countries that get most affected by this are (relatively) small markets and gamers, while obstreperous, are only occasionally effective at forcing changes in business policy of gaming companies.

Keep in mind regional pricing done right *could* be the most fair pricing solution for everyone - even more fair than the one world price by charging everyone according to their purchasing power rather than exchange rate. But that's not what's happened in practice with regional pricing and unless GOG is going to do something radical on that front (which seems unlikely given their statements though I remain hopeful), it's going to remain unfair for a lot of people.

^This.

I wonder how long until GOG throws away it's goals of DRM free in pursuit of profit. Slowly but surely, it's looking like I might as well just use Steam, the only difference is going to be the added convenience Valves platform provides.

People said selling new games would lead to drm. They said selling episodic would lead to drm. That selling dlc would lead to drm. It hasnt. Obviously gog has done the research and determined that a significant amount of publishers would open their doors on launch if they use regional pricing. Some publishers wont no matter what unless they use drm, and im sure gog is aware of them too.

A lot of us also said it wouldn't lead to regional pricing ... and it has ;)

No I don't think GOG will implement DRM, but then the regional pricing is a joke and basically unenforceable. That's why people are saying it's an "in" for DRM because without it, regional pricing can't actually be enforced.

I honestly dont know about that. The witcher 2 did it around the same time they started selling new games, so it shouldnt come as a shock, or have been considered somthing impossible to happen.

i get that, but again, i trust that gog has done the research to determine which companies this decision wins them points with, and whether this is "enough". I suspect its companies like daedalic, and other indie smaller studios that gog wants to win back some support from, and not the giant publishers who will just say "enforce it with drm!"

Which is what worries me. Either they will eventually abandoned the regional pricing because they can't enforce it, or they will introduce DRM to actually try to enforce it. I don't really want to find out and prefer to try to avoid that situation completely.

When the Witcher 2 did it they were extremely apologetic about it and tried everything they could to circumvent it. They went so far that GOG and CDPR got taken to court by their distributor (and lost).
A lot of the smaller indies are digital only and don't have regional pricing anyway - on steam, here, or anywhere else. This is to get the larger companies who are still holdouts on board and GOG is hoping that they'll not require anything else to sign up.

Like crazy_dave said earlier, it's an in for DRM because it makes sense to add it to enforce regional pricing.

Adding new games , DLC, episodes and so on has no logical reason to introduce DRM unlike regional pricing.

I'm not for banning all regional pricing. Regional pricing is often a good thing, like the cheap prices for Russian territories on Steam, or charging more in certain countries where the economy is different.

I am for refusing BAD regional pricing, however.

Nope, they won on the DRM-free part, they lost on trying to circumvent the regional pricing through GOG. They had to pay Namco-Bandai restitution on that and reimplement regional pricing on GOG upon which GOG made sure everyone knew that Eurozone customers (and other who were affected) got extra games to make up the price difference.


GOG is introducing regional pricing hoping that the AAA companies will come here - a lot of the "smaller" AAA companies are forced into distribution deals that include regional pricing (as CDPR was) and thus don't have a choice and the larger companies are the same distributors who insist on regional pricing for newer games. GOG is stating that a number of companies that have refused to sign with GOG have done so because of regional pricing issues rather than DRM issues. However, a number of companies also won't be happy that the regional pricing is unenforceable on GOG without DRM. Now I don't think that pressure will be enough for GOG to relent on DRM-free gaming, but I didn't think the pressure would be enough for them to relent on regional pricing either.
I agree regional pricing *could* be the most fair solution for everyone (even better than GOG's one world price), but isn't for many, many countries ...

Well, I hate DRM... very much.

I just figure that gog will do the region thing, and will not bother stopping people from bypassing it, just like they do not stop pirates now. Just do the bare minimum to get them games on here.