Was saying I'll do a summary after one year, so here goes. Just
posted on my blog as well. Corrections welcome, and in case of the list of 25 actually expected.
Yesterday marked one year since GOG.com’s
“good news” announcement, which promised day-one launches and preorders for big AAA titles and games from major studios and barely mentioned the price for this, namely introducing regional pricing for said titles, in passing. So, after all this time, what did we get as a result of them giving up on one of their two clear, specific, core values, and in fact on the one which made them stand out the most, since at the moment there are quite a few other on-line stores offering DRM-free games, but as far as I’m aware only one,
ShinyLoot, left offering flat prices?
Well, the biggest title added during this time is quite clearly the preorder for
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. However, being self-published by GOG.com’s parent company, CD Projekt, that would have obviously been sold on GOG regardless of circumstances.
Just like it happened with
The Witcher 2, it may have ended up regionally priced as an exception, while the rest of the catalog was not, but one must remember that, when that happened back then, they fought back as much as they could, initially suggested how users could get around the pricing, only closed off that loophole when court orders gave them no other options, and then still struggled to get it back to flat pricing at the first possible opportunity. In case of The Witcher 3, on the other hand, CD Projekt simply signed a distribution deal with the same company that forced them into that mess right away and went forward with this pricing scheme as if it was the most normal thing there is. In other words, at the time of the mess with The Witcher 2, they still stood for something, proving that they were in this business to change how things work, while now they’re acting like any other business, only holding, or pretending to hold, values which generate enough profit to be worth it strictly in that sense.
And while I’m at CD Projekt,
The Witcher Adventure Game, developed by a different company but also published by them, should be removed from the list as well, for the exact same reasons stated above. Some things could be said about the very fact that this game exists, not merely about using regional pricing for it, but that’s not exactly the issue here, so I’ll leave it aside.
Other than that, we did recently get
titles, through [url=http://www.gog.com/games##devpub=disney]Disney, and even more recently
Warner Bros. and older
games, but the first two groups aren't regionally priced while the third only has the "Russian discount", and I'll talk about that later. The sole exception is the preorder for [url=http://www.gog.com/game/pillars_of_eternity_hero_edition]Pillars of Eternity and its increasingly ludicrously priced
[url=http://www.gog.com/game/pillars_of_eternity_royal_edition]editions, which is published by Paradox Interactive, yet this was not added because GOG.com finally made a deal with them, but had already been added earlier, because the developers had pledged to make the game available on GOG while
asking for funds on Kickstarter and would have therefore needed to be here regardless of circumstances. If anything, since that pledge was made back when GOG still held all of its old values, it can quite clearly be said that the very fact that it uses regional pricing is in itself a violation of that pledge and therefore the fact that GOG allowed this to happen made things worse than they would have been otherwise.
And while I’m on this topic, I must mention
Wasteland 2 as well, which was in the exact same situation as Pillars of Eternity. It was
funded via Kickstarter long before GOG.com gave up on the flat pricing principle, it was promised to be available on GOG, and it therefore would have had to be on GOG, most likely being expected to adhere to the principles GOG held at the time the funding effort started. After all, if we allow a developer to promise to have a game on GOG at a time when GOG didn’t allow regional pricing but also let them negotiate a deal with them to only keep that promise if they’ll get rid of that principle, what’s stopping some other developer from doing the same when it comes to the DRM-free principle at some later point?
So, to return to the question, it can be said that the more notable titles we did get as a result of accepting regional pricing were those initially announced, namely Age of Wonders 3 and Divinity: Original Sin. However, while good games that many, myself included, would otherwise want to play and even buy, I wouldn’t exactly call them AAA titles, and either way they are self-published by studios which already had their other games on GOG.com, with flat pricing, and in Larian’s case those other games also include the newer
Divinity 2: Developer's Cut and even [url=http://www.gog.com/games##search=divinity:%20dragon%20commander]Divinity: Dragon Commander[/url], which was released only a year and a half ago.
And now that we have the specific names and titles out of the way, let’s look at what’s left by the numbers, starting from the fact that there currently are
Retro City Rampage DX, which was switched to regional pricing when the DX edition replaced the original one, we’re down to 59.
Starting from that number, we must look at the situation generated by
introducing support for multiple currencies on August 27. It is an entirely different issue and I’d like to keep it as such, so I won’t say much about the 33 games which were removed because of it and didn’t yet return. However, I must mention that 23 out of the 59 titles we’re left with on the list
were switched to regional pricing at that time, because of this support, and two more, which were initially removed then, were added back later, also with regional pricing. As such, since these are obviously titles which could be on GOG, and which actually were on GOG, with flat pricing, the number goes down to 34. For anyone keeping track, that’s less than a third of the actual current number of 108.
Then we can look at ShinyLoot, to see which games are also available there, obviously indicating that they may be sold at a flat price. That allows us to also remove
Randal’s Monday,
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and possibly also
The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, though the last two are not DRM-free there and the last one only has the beta available at the moment. Still, especially since those last two are published by Nordic Games and the games they have there show that their problem isn’t flat pricing in itself, but flat pricing when multiple currencies are offered, I’d include all of them and get the number down to 29, since both of those last two have two entries in the catalog.
Now is the time for cleaning up what’s left a little, removing the
Special Edition and
for Dreamfall Chapters, as well as [url=http://www.gog.com/game/age_of_wonders_3_deluxe_edition]Age of Wonders 3 Deluxe Edition and
the DLC for Divinity: Original Sin, to leave only base games and DLC released after the original game. That means I am leaving Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition, Mount & Blade: Warband – Viking Conquest and Surgeon Simulator Anniversary Edition, even though the respective base games have either been removed already or, in the latter case, aren’t regionally priced at all. These are a separate later release, which didn’t replace the original one, and two pieces of DLC, so it can be argued that they may not have been added except on these terms.
(cont...)
