That's out of our hands, as I already indicated; regional pricing for publishers or devs is in their hands.

You're conflating two different things. DRM and regional pricing aren't exactly related.

I understand that this change is one that people will be concerned about, particularly because the nature of this announcement is that we can't give complete answers to every question simply because we don't have answers to all of your questions ourselves.

But I guess it's worth asking: when we rolled out new games in 2012, a lot of people were really concerned. I saw a lot of comments like the ones here in this thread. Since then we've released games like System Shock 2, the WIzardry series, the Leisure Suit Larry series, Neverwinter Nights 2, I Have No Mouth and I must Scream, the complete Wing Commander series, and many more classics. I think we did an excellent job of adopting a new type of release on GOG.com while still sticking to the classics that we have been known for since we started. I think users who trusted us to keep our word that we would continue to release great classics even though we were releasing newer games as well found that we have rewarded that trust in spades.

Here we have said, "This is a big change, and it's one that we know will worry you. We're excited about the games that will be coming to GOG.com, and we're promising that we will do everything that we can to keep our regional pricing fair for everyone." At some point, doesn't the fact that we've been fighting the good fight for 5 years give us any earned trust on the part of our community? We will do what we can to make regional pricing as fair as possible. Trust us, for the moment, and see what happens.

Over the last 5 years, I believe that we have shown ourselves to be a company that is relentlessly focussed on treating our customers better than anyone else in the industry does. We think this change can be something that's good for you, because you'll find great games DRM-free on GOG.com that wouldn't be DRM-free without this. These games are going to be the same price everywhere in the world, except GOG.com will be giving something for you guys out of our pockets to help make up the difference between regional prices.

I understand that the lack of clarity for our policy is bringing confusion, and confusion brings a certain amount of fear with it. I ask that you--and the rest of the guys in the thread--think about our track record of how we treat our gamers with respect. What you're feeling is understandable, and I've found myself in the same situation before. I've found that the track record of the organization that's making promises is worth keeping in mind in circumstances like this, and I think our established history speaks for itself in that regard.

We don't set pricing for any game we sell. If we find the terms too onerous, we can elect to not sell it, but that's fundamentally our only rights when it comes to the titles on GOG.com. The fact that we have an audience for the games we sell means that we get a certain amount of negotiation power, but this is a case where, for the companies where they have set up regional pricing have contracts with retail chains and other digital distributors and they're not gonna break their covenants just to make us happy. Either we provide them with regional pricing or we don't sell their game. Simple as that.

What stops people from going to pirate bay and getting everything for free forever?

I can tell you about the deals that we currently have signed--well, I could except for the fact that we have NDAs in place--but I can't tell you what will happen after GOG.com goes to the largest professional game developer conference in the Western hemisphere in 6 weeks' time and talks to all of the partners who have given us the brush off for a variety of reasons in the past.

As such, anything I say now is rather speculative. But we will be launching a game with regional pricing before we go to GDC. So we can either announce this with as much notice as we can give so you so that the game doesn't show up as a surprise, or we can tell you what we know now and talk it out with you guys.

It's pretty evident which way the management team went with this one.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here.

No, I can't; contracts come up for re-negotiation all the time, and when they do there's no telling what may happen. I can promise that we did not go into this change with the intent of re-pricing swathes of our catalog of classic games in a manner that's unfair to gamers around the world. I can promise you that we will strive our utmost to keep things fair for gamers everywhere in the world. But I'm not gonna make a promise on something like this and then find in 18 months or 2 years that things turned out differently than we had thought they would.

Ah, that's pretty much a no regardless. Either a game is regionally priced or it's not. We're not going to have a "choose your own currency" system in place for games, because that strikes me as complete insanity for the end user to try and manage.

As above, no. We can't promise this. We can promise that, especially for back catalog, we have no interest or particular intent in trying to offer regionally-changed titles. But we've already been forced to offer censored titles before on GOG.com, and there's no telling if it will happen again.

Yes, actually. This announcement is indicative of a relatively small change in our current catalog offering. A small change that we believe will end up making a big shift in the titles that we are able to offer you. But we will never simply assume that regional pricing is the way to go. For newer games, there are frequently in-place agreements that simply cannot be circumvented that relate to competitive pricing in various regions of the world--think of mysterious examples of when we offer games that oddly don't seem to stack up to what you find on Steam for the same price and you can probably track down some examples where this has happened to us in the past--but particularly for classic games these agreements are substantially less common. For those games in particular, we will fight as best as we can to secure fair pricing everywhere in the world.

Yes. Well, provided that you don't call anything in the cataog already something with DRM, lest I break this promise before I even get started.

Well, here's the thing--and I've seen a lot of people echo this comment--it *is* good news. I think bringing Divinity: Original Sin and many other games that are fantastic examples of their genre to GOG.com is exciting. I think the fact that we're offering them for the same price as any other store in the world means that we're not necessarily directly competitive on price, but that's okay because selling on pricing is never a smart play in the long term. I think the fact that we care enough about our gamers to offer free games to you guys at our own costs--and that we have already gotten contractual agreements to do so in place for three games--should be good news to you as well.

You can buy a day-one game like Divinity: Original Sin from any store on the 'Net for the same price, but if you get it from GOG.com you get a free bonus game from us--and, of course your DRM-free copy of the game. We thought it's cool that we can do this, and while this kind of change is scary for both us and you, we thought that making a big change like this is something that will pay off in exciting new opportunities for GOG.com and the gamers who come and hang out here.

I'm not peeing on your head and telling you it's raining. It's more along the lines of "for every silver lining there is a cloud."

It wouldn't.

Our official mission statement, as recently painted in our office, is "To make the world's best games available DRM-Free". To that end, we spend some time thinking about what the main blocking issues for us were in preventing this from happening. One issue that cropped up continually in conversation was exactly what we're talking about today: we have rights holders for great games--the kind of games that would do fantastically on GOG.com, and that would be hugely enjoyed by our gamers--who cannot play ball with a company that prices things non-competitively. If we are truly striving to make the best games we can find available without DRM, we needed to solve this problem, and this was the best solution we could find.

That seems pretty tongue-in-cheek to me.

Well, no. That's not what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say is what I actually said there.

But let's suppose that when a contract comes up for offer, someone asks about a $5.99 game on GOG. It's been selling well, but they wanna know what we're doing about localizing our prices. While they make up their own minds about pricing, we can give them advice and make recommendations based upon our experience as experts in the field of "selling games online." There's, what, 3 stores on the 'Net that have 700 or more games in their catalog? 4? Our advice does carry with it some weight. Don't you think that, given what we've already said about our goals for keeping regional prices fair that it might not be a reasonable to believe that we're gonna push for that game to be 4.49 EUR or something like that instead of 5.99 EUR? That's indubitably regional pricing and regional currencies, but I think it's manifestly fair and probably even better for local users than what we have now.

Is that what's going to happen? Heck, Wishbone, I dunno. As I've made clear elsewhere in the thread, this is early days for this particular news. We're telling you guys about this now because we have some regionally-priced games lined up soon and needed to tell you guys about this before their releases, but this is also something that's developing as we speak. I realize that thinking of regional pricing as something other than "you're about to get screwed over" can be tough to conceive, given how other stores have approached this, but let's see what's possible before lighting a pitchfork,* okay?



*if you're lighting a pitchfork on fire, you've done something terribly wrong. Please consult your instruction manual or call technical support.
I appreciate the qualifier, there. :P

If I defenestrate my bladder, we have bigger problems than who's below the window. Like why is my bladder outside my body and flying out a window? 0_o

Sorry you feel that way (and man, it took a long time to read through the thread updates since Saturday). I can't say a whole lot about our plans for this because of NDAs / it's not the messaging that we've agreed upon with partners. What I will say is: maybe you should see how implementation for this works before you throw the baby out with the bath water.

Also: we've been paying attention to all of the comments in this thread (and had about an hour-long meeting about it this morning). Guillaume is writing a more in-depth explanations about what exactly we're planning on doing with regional pricing in the future. I think part of what you guys see as the disconnect between the tone of the messaging that we have here and how you feel is that you don't know all of the details for what we're planning. Regardless, we'll be posting something more in-depth tomorrow about this. Hopefully you (and the rest of the folks here in the forums) will be able to rest substantially easier once he's had his say.

I guess you didn't see the 30-plus replies I left at the beginning of the thread? After Saturday, we were pretty much arguing in circles and there wasn't a lot of reason to keep answering the same questions. But I can promise you that most all of the department heads at GOG have read through this thread (or at least large parts of it) and we're taking your replies to heart.

Well, yes and no. We knew that, especially given how little I was able to get clearance to tell you guys, that this would not go over smoothly. The strength of the reaction has made TheFrenchMonk and w0rma rethink our messaging priorities and we're telling you guys things that we had not initially planned to go into the details of yet.