I work at Deadalic, in business development.

Please let me explain the situation with the German language before we get nailed to the wall ).

When Daedalic started the production of The Night of the Rabbit, the company needed to bring in external money in order to be able to fund the development. The reason being that Daedalic as a business is still not a company that's rich enough to be fully independent. Yes, as much as we like to be, we simply aren't. Our games get good ratings and some of them sell really well (the Deponia series), but this is still not enough to say "let's do a new $500.000 game" and just start the production on our own.

The external money in this industry can come from three sources: (1) a loan against company assets - not possible in our case, as we don't own much; (2) an investment form a third party - not possible in our case, as Daedalic is still chaotically independent, meaning loads of creativity, nice people and smiles in the hallways, but no "organizational chart" or "cahsflow plan" or "company prospectus" - we simple don't speak that language (yet); we will, one day, but not when we started the development of TNotR and not even now; and finally, (3) a pre-sales of the product we want to develop to a distributor, against future sales - and this is what we've done with The Night of the Rabbit, pre-selling it to the German distributor.

This pre-sale allowed us to develop the game and we're very thankful to the company that trusted in us so much that they were willing to advance money based on our concept, more than a year away from the completion date. However, no lunch is free in this world, and there was a catch in this case just as well: under the contract, we pre-sold both the retail and the digital rights. Meaning, we can't make a decision on our own as to how, and where, and at what price to offer German version digitally - we have to have our partner's approval.

Now, our partner in this case is a German distributor. A very well-organized company with excellent reputation and one major know-how: how to ship and sell retail boxes. They are fantastically good at that. And without their advance, we wouldn't be able to produce this title. But at the same time, they are also pretty protective, and they want to make sure that German version digitally is available at the same price as in retail. The retail price being Euro 34.99, i.e. a bit over $40.

Since GOG offers "one world, one price concept", we had two options. Or in fact, three:

a) not to offer TNotR on GOG at all; just sell through Steam, where we can set the German price to be 1:1 of German retail price, the Russian price to be 1:1 of Russian retail price, same for Czech Republic, Brazil, Poland, etc.

b) to offer TNotR on GOG for $40. thus making every country in the world pay the German (high) retail price for this product. And while in the retail edition, you have soundtrack, posters, etc. - a lot of goodies, it's a great box all in all, - in digital edition you'll have only the game and the soundtrack.

c) to offer TNotR on GOG for $20... on the condition that we don't break the contract because we're not selling German version at such price.

We reviewed all of these options, and decided that (c) is the option that will benefit the majority of all players. Not all, mind you - but the majority. Just like with Russians, BTW, where in retail the Russian version of the game is 299 RUR ($9.99), but they have to pay $19.99 on GOG, as there's simply no way around managing prices region by region.

This decision is not ideal.

But it's the best that we could do under the circumstances.

Just to be clear: we approached our German distribution partner and offered to "buy back" the German localization rights, so that we could offer German on GOG. But they were not interested. And so, considering alternatives exhausted, we listed the current version, at $19.99, with 7 languages - excluding German.

I'm not proud of this decision. In fact, this made me quite mad when I realized that this is the way we'll have to go forward. But then, without our German partner we wouldn't be able to fund the game, and if they don't want to let us offer German for under $40, then what can we do? Tell them to go to hell - after helping us make this game possible? Yes, we'll never ever (as long as I work for Daedalic) will sign again a contract with similar prohibition. And yet with The Night of the Rabbit, we had to play with the cards that we've been dealt.

One more thing: the game will be available on Steam in 2 editions, regular and premium. These will be multi-lingual, 8 languages. But even there, in Germany only Premium will be available, at Euro 29.99, based on the same demand: that we do not undercut the retail sales.

Are we proud of this? No. We believe in GOG's policy and we respect GOG's community. So yes, we deserve the criticism. But please also understand the reasons behind this suboptimal decision: without pre-sales to our distribution partner, we would not have made this game. And then it would be worse than this, really, because Matt Kempke's world would have remained on paper.

Please accept my and my colleagues's sincere apologies for this inconvenience and please be assured that it never was, and never will be, a part of our policy to discriminate any particular region or location - in fact, it's the opposite, and as you can see, TNotR the first-ever Daedalic title to ship in 8 languages at launch. We hope that as we get more successful sales-wise, we're able to offer even more (Italian, for example).

Hope this clears up the situation a bit.