paladin181: (...) sad that so few people care that GOG, (with Gremlins, Inc and GWENT) are slipping away from optional clients and DRM-Free. A large portion of us care, and PASSIONATELY. Most of the customers alas probably do not. And when the almighty dollar (pound, denar, ruple, mark, Euro, etc) speaks, no one talks louder than it. It's just hard for us to watch our once-bastion of good faith and hope in the world against anti-consumer practices (like DRM and regional pricing) go down.(...)
The power of GOG to impact change is proportionate to the power of GOG to sell games.
As an off-topic to this thread, I've seen developers walk away from various platforms when these platforms stopped being more than 5% of the market, because creative people rarely have time to do anything but the most critical for their products. Whenever a platform falls below 10%, it's already hard going. Whenever a platform falls below 5%, consider it a major feat.
Games like Machinarium from Amanita took years to come out on different platforms. Would customers be happier if that happened at the same time? For sure. But at that time, console platforms were very passionate (to use your term) about enforcing their own set of rules, among them – paid patches. Enter the era of digital distribution and cases like ours, where we made 50+ updates to the game after its release, and that console model effectively cuts off good content.
Now, we're a small fish, but if you look at the bigger products that move millions of copies and account for millions of hours of happy playtime, you'll see the same thread, and thank god the console platforms are now getting more open. As the result, a good game has higher chance to reach new audiences, and everyone wins.
As to the regional pricing, I have no idea how this could be "unfair". We and pretty much every other dev that I know of, use US/EU as the base, and then discount China, Russia, Latam, and all the other regions where players have smaller purchasing power. Ukraine, for example, is struggling a lot right now. How can we ask for $15 there, when they make /3 of what people make in, say, Germany? So we ask for $5 there.
On Steam, Poland is included in the EU region, since Steam does not support PLN (local currency). Our sales to Poland at €15 via Steam were pretty modest, even though we invest in full Polish localisation. One thing I see form GOG sales already, is that when we were able to set the locally adjusted price in PLN for Poland here, our sales to Poland jumped into top3 regions. Regional pricing in this case makes us able to meet the expectations of more players in Poland, how could this be bad for anyone?
And to get back to the opening statement.
Games like GWENT and ours and similar, bring new audience to GOG. GOG needs new audience to survive and grow in the modern world. For sure, GOG has certain values, which are core to its mission. But it's like going to the church. Some churches focus on what's in the heart, and will open arms to anyone who shares their belief. And some churches focus on whether you have your headscarf, how long is your t-shirts, and whether there are any tattoos visible. These churches recently tend to decline.
To us as a developer, having GOG grow is great, since this keeps the landscape diverse, and provides different feedback; and feedback is the best thing out there. In the same way, Humble Store is great: they sell Steam keys, but hey, their monthly bundle is offering something which Steam does not offer, and that niche makes more people happy at the expense of no one's.
What is bad to me, if this were to happen to GOG, is for GOG to become less and less relevant to the industry, so that fewer good products launch here, up to the point where the platform is simply an unaffordable investment for indie teams. Case in hand – Battle Brothers. An amazing, superb game. They could not afford the time to support any language other than English. They created a Windows-only game. They are a very small team and their game is fantastic. Do you guys want these games to come to GOG, too, or do you want to miss these new titles?
GOG can remain a platform with its own set of values while embracing the new developments in the industry. But it is much less likely that GOG will grow, if it remains focused on the "not" and "never" parts of the description, as more and more smaller teams struggle to manage their time and end up focusing just on the most crucial channels.
Klumpen0815: It's about
false advertising, nothing more and nothing less.
You'd get even worse reactions if you'd sell meat in a vegetarian restaurant or on a vegetarian expo/market.
It's a valid comparison since you're selling DRMed software in a DRM-free store.
Does this mean that any game that contains any parts (multiplayer) that rely on a server connection, cannot be sold on GOG? So that we should, for example, remove Gremlins, Inc. – while keeping Gremlins vs Automatons?
Then Steam customers will get Gremlins, Inc. and Gremlins vs Automatons at $15. And GOG customers will pay the same $15 but will not receive Gremlins, Inc. because the rule that you quote above, prohibits adding such content (even when it's included with the offline edition)?