Tells us a fair bit about the stance up at corporate re: any principles.

*Double-checks price of print books*

Granted that was a slower increase.

Not saying no increase occurs. Just that it tends to occur at a rate considered imperceptible to the average consumer. I actually noted a significant jump in the price of softcover books over a decade ago here in the States, but this was tied to the popularity of trade paperbacks. This larger and higher quality format became more common, and at the same time was another format shift that allowed the industry to introduce a kind of quantum jump in prices.

That's the distinction I'm trying to make. All prices tend to increase, but perceptible increase is easier to cloak in a format shift.

Another bad explanation from the developer of Inxile again blaiming everything on the VAT: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/preorder_wasteland_2_digital_deluxe_edition/post365

BTW: It's strange to see, that very small starving companies (usually handcrafted stuff with real costs for material, production and distribution for every single article) eager to sell something to survive are tending to pay the VAT out of their own pocket while big companies with million deals always let the customers pay for it and then something on top of it when they have the opinion that customer of country X has to be able to pay it.

Yes, they still don't get it. I remember that already in March when the discussion here started many people said that the best would be flat prices worldwide before taxes, not after. What can we do? We can just write it over and over again.

Not strange at all - the less elastic the demand for something, the greater the share of an indirect tax that business is able to pass onto consumers. Through branding and the like, the big companies have (or at least believe they have) a captive audience that's unwilling to stop buying their products, so they're able to offload the tax burden, while the small fry have to fear that their target audience will simply buy an alternative product that's priced more reasonably (which often enough includes products from the big-company competition which is able to take advantage of economies of scale and offer a lower pre-tax price).

That depends on the excess amount the publishers decide to charge.

Let's assume the usual 70/30 split both for the regionally-priced game and the flat-priced game that gets bought with the store credit afterwards, and let's make the USD price $1.

US base price: 1
Regional price: 1+x
Publisher share: 0.7 + 0.7x
GOG share: 0.3 + 0.3x

Buyer credit: x
Publisher share of game bought with credit: 0.7x

Total GOG share: 0.3 + 0.3x - 0.7x = 0.3 - 0.4x

In other words, for every 10% that's regionally added on top of the base price, GOG's share is reduced by 4 percentage points, i.e. if the regional price in the example is $1.20, GOG's share is 22 cents instead of 30 cents. As a percentage of revenue the reduction is greater, of course, since that reduced absolute share comes out of increased revenues. (In the above case it's .22 / 1.20 = 18.3% instead of the base-price 0.30 / 1.00 = 30%.)

Anyway, as long as the regional pricing demands by the publishers aren't too extreme, GOG does still make money on the fair-price policy, and could conceivably even come out ahead if it leads to increased demand. And this doesn't incorporate the possibility that a certain percentage of store credit will ultimately go unused and expire, which would mitigate GOG's cost of the policy.

Oh, I agree. It was just a good opportunity to complain about the price of books.

It appears to be both. It seems like a much better place to pre-order The Witcher 3 from instead of GOG, at less than half the price advertised here. Divinity: Original Sin for $22 is a steal as well.

It isn't digital only as one can pre-order The Witcher 3 boxed copy via that site. There may be more, but my Polish is a bit rusty to search further. And yes, that store is far from DRM free, especially when it comes to purchasing movies:

"This video uses technology Silverlight , which is only available for Microsoft Windows and MacOSX 10.5.7+. This film does not work on other systems such as iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry OS."

Maybe they can tout a DRM free stance given that HTML 5 has DRM embedded thanks to mega-fucking corporations protecting their interests at the expense of everyone else(*shock* *horror* *gasp*).

Edit: It is a bit disconcerting that under every "DRM free" movie, one reads "We reproduce movies with the program: Silverlight. Make sure that your computer has installed the appropriate software." That doesn't sound very DRM-free to me.

Why are all the game prices showing up as euros now, there are no dollar amounts anymore when I'm logged in the shop? What gives, when I check the exchange rate, the euro prices are always clearly higher than the dollar prices.

Just scroll down. There's an option to change your currency back to US Dollar.

And the Euro prices are not always higher. For the games I've checked in the past, they were a little higher (some cents) for the games in a promo, but cheaper for newly released games. Regionally priced games are an exception of course (most of them are about 30% more expensive in the Euro zone).

Just was informed about the currency slider in another thread, but thanks! This is good that the currency can still be changed.

Silverlight is essentially Microsoft's answer to Flash. For a while they seemed to have given up on it, but lately they seem to be trying another push. Anyway, it's definitely annoying, but it's no more DRM than anything requiring Flash is.

Netflix used Silverlight. It's just a video player with interactive options like Flash or Shockwave.