Not really interested in trying technical stuff like that,even if it's easy.I'm sure Gog can survive without my money for one game that I may or not buy from them..

By now other people here have responded better than I could, and I'd rather not reiterate everything that has come up in this thread.

But I would like to also show my disappointment in GOG.com starting the regional blocking of games.

This one isn´t a good comparision, course selling DRM-free in games isn´t illegal in any state in the world!

I guess we ought to keep a list of VPNs and similar services, so that people can do as they wish. Censorship is the hallmark of a country that wishes to indoctrinate and enslave their residents.

In any case, it should be noted that the developers of Hotline 2 encourage people in Australia to pirate the game. Be it via VPN, gifts, or through piracy, please resist Australia's misguided mindset.

Hotline 2 Developers to Australian Gamers: "Just pirate it."

The problem is the media attention this case got, it was huge---and in the comments below GOG was mentioned as an option to avoid this problematic! You see?
You can´t avoid them anymore, they do know GOG now!
I do strongly believe that these lawyers a clever enough to read the comments under these news and find GOG... :(
Gifts, gifts, gifts! A wrong method by your opponents (politic-wise these folks are my opponents, yes!) shouldn´t be answered with wrong methods!
It should be answered with "pure love" (aka gifts)---OK, this one included a little bit of overdrive! :D :D :D

The worst thing that could happen GOG selling Hotline Miami 2 would be, that in order to force their POV Australian legistlative system could request Australian banks to refuse payments towards GOG alltogether untile the matter is resolved. That could lead into a situation where no-one with Australian bank account and credit card would not be able to buy anything from GOG.

Restrictign Austarlian customers from purchasing the game really is the lesser evil.

Releasing a censored version in the censoring-happy country and spreading a decensoring patch over the internet.
That's what has been done many times in the case of German censoring, although of course nobody knows who really spreaded the patches.
In cases like Unreal Tournament, they just added a simple "no gore" line in some .cfg that you could easily change from 1 to 0.

Well, the version sold here is banned. The censored version is not.

Every time a game gets banned in AU, it gets media attention. This is no different. And certainly not an excuse for GOG to introduce an inconsistent double standard. Either they sell this worldwide, or they pull all the other banned games from the region too. Or better yet, they make a requirement of the publisher to provide an alternate version for AU before allowing it to be sold. As would be in keeping in their worldwide availability principle.

But then, once GOG started regional pricing it was obvious regional restrictions were never far away, despite their responses to the contrary.

None got as much as this one, and most important: No other one of them was available on GOG at that time!

And, please excuse my choice of words, but @all of you: SHUT THE FUCK UP with regional pricing!
Thanks to the fair price package regional pricement on GOG DOES NOT BLOODY FUCKING MATTER!

Everybody with basic calculation skills can proof this under the assumption that folks are buying a mix of regional priced and non regional priced games! Well, even if there´d only be regional priced games it wouldn´t be a huge it!

Nah, it was an original fear from day one. What TET said last year: "True enough. And I hope that will never happen, but if it does, then there's still a game that's DRM-free in 195 other countries in the world, which seems a lot better to me than a game which is DRM-free in 0 countries."

What GOG says now:

"We hated to hear it as much as you do, but after thoughtful consideration we felt that by refusing to sell the game worldwide, we would effectively apply the Australian censorship to 190+ other countries in the world. That would be unfairly punishing not just to our customers, but also the developers who took a stand against censoring their game.
By preventing purchases from IP's located within the borders of Australia, we make sure that the smallest number of people are affected by the ban. It sucks, but we believe it's the least of all evils.""

Notice the similarities?

I wrote the same to another thread, but what the heck...

What are the realistic alternatives for GOG?

This is not a restriction imposed by the game publisher with which GOG negotiates directly (well, maybe the publisher has told GOG not to sell the game in Australia, but I'm sure the publisher would want to do that, if they were allowed). It is the government. It is not reasonable to expect e.g. GOG to negotiate with Australian government to change their policies. What possible reason would Australian government have to agree with GOG, or the game publisher? I think they have zero incentive.

It is interesting question though what could happen at worst if GOG decided to sell the game anyway to Australians? Does Australia use IP filtering, like many other countries nowadays do (Finland included, e.g. PBay has been inaccessible from here for a long time, without workarounds)? So could it be that if GOG sells to Australians games banned in Australia, the whole GOG site would be blocked by the Australian filters, effectively banning all GOG games from Australians? Or some payment options between Australians and GOG.com would be blocked?

tl;dr: I think it is different when discussing about restrictions demanded by the game publisher, or some backwaters government like Saudi-Arabia, Iran or Australia.


Anyway, as I keep saying: vote with your wallet.

If you don't like the fact that the game is not sold to Australian IP addresses, don't buy the game. That'll show them!

(I don't know who is "them", but someone will really learn his lesson. Or her.)

What the heck? And the rest of us are supposed to pay for the game, only the Australians get it free?!?

I demand the Finnish goverment to ban this game, right now! Think about the children (but not when you are playing this game)!

It might not bother you, but for many of us it is still an important matter. We know that we won't lose money, because of the fair price model (even that's debatable, because I have less money in my bank account when I buy a regional priced game).

But for us it's about principles (principles that GOG shared for years). By allowing regional priced games here, GOG is supporting that unfair pricing model (at least unfair the way it is done everywhere at the moment) and we don't feel that's right. And in the end GOG is paying the difference which isn't right as well.

So please don't tell us to shut up. We won't do it anyway.

Very interesting, nice catch Gragar as I had actually forgotten about that response. In short everything started spiraling down after the good news announcements and subsequent reassurances and the trend keeps continuing. Next will be regionally locked movies I presume since it would be very difficult for GOG to expand their movie catalog otherwise.