I'm guessing that if pressed they'll throw some excuse about needing to do it to enable Witcher 3 gifting? I mean, assuming at least that's being enabled now?

Yes it is. As far as I can see every game can be bought as a gift now.

Oh, the one that was going to usher in an age of prosperity for the common people by forcing business to be lean and competitive at local scales, while also holding those business to greater accountability. Because that's totally how the free market works, don't you know?

One learns something new every day. ;-)


After thinking a bit about this, I wonder if this is legal, at least in the EU.

The original EU as it was envisioned and chartered? Probably not. But this new EU, the one that fiddled while Greece burned? I doubt they care a fig.

I'm afraid you're right, still an inquiry to MEPs can't hurt.

More true than you probably thought when you said this.

How interesting! So we actually get different prices here on my side of the Maple Curtain in some cases.

Said it before, saying it again - what a sorry mess.

Understatement of the week?

This actually passes the smell test, based on the teachings of a certain mythical EU lawyer who used to frequent the forum. A gift code is not a product. The license (whether transferrable in light of EU court rulings or not) is not transferred from the gift buyer to the recipient with the code, rather, it's granted to the user who redeems the code at the moment the code is redeemed. Before that, no license exists.

Furthermore, the inability to do whatever you want with the code is what ensures promotions exist at all. The limited-time nature of the promotions 'rewards' people for keeping up with the news (and buying more games) and making impulse purchases (and buying more games). Indefinite 'promotions' effected by third-party sites isn't something the current sales model supports. Do people want to lose it?

As for the change itself, I don't know what to think. Russian reselling should be stopped (fuck, there's a guy on the Russian subforum boasting about having made mad cash reselling Steam gifts). The cheaper the region, the stronger the negative effect on the people in that region... but they (we) already have it smooth and creamy, having regional discounts in the first place.

I honestly think no pricing is fair pricing: making a copy doesn't cost anything. Games cost resources to develop, but runaway successes don't partially refund the buyers. Regional prices exist in the interest of the seller, to maximize profit (and if I'm being charitable, higher profit = more good art from the same worthy creator). A 'suggested donation' based on the user's wealth is, to me, fair; the ricockulous unfairness of the regional pricing system is in it not distinguishing between individual countries in the region and individual people.

(And the deep discounts model is what helps poor people in non-discounted regions to actually afford games.)

With arbitrary game prices and an anti-piracy stance, what justification is there for tricking the pricing system? A creator (again, I'm being charitable), setting the price, says "I spent my time and money investing in my education and then making this thing that you're interested in. I gave up years of my life, and I ask that you honor this with a payment of [say] $10". What justification is there for "Nah, I'll get that other guy to click the button and pay you $2 and feel ohsoclever about it", compared to outright piracy? At least piracy doesn't (usually) tax the infrastructure intended for paying users.

Mathematically, I just don't get what the kerfuffle is about. People in this thread (US, US, Rich Europe, Poor Europe) aren't affected by the change. The most affected legitimate users are users in discounted regions buying gifts for users in discounted regions. (It is perhaps bad for marketing in those regions, but I trust GOG to know their marketing strategy.)

From the standpoint of fairness... Yes, I realize that the whole digital economy is based on that very flimsy notion, that it requires customers to accept and Truly Believe that the current practice is Fair and Moral to get them to pay for digital goods, and that changing the rules and declaring a different practice Fair and Moral shits on that. The sole act of changing the policy is an insult. But I don't see how the result is worse. It stops rewarding people for claiming a sekrit Russian friend bought them gifts and stops punishing people for buying games at prices the creator actually asked them to pay. How is it bad?

While your point is well taken, and I agree with a good swathe of it, I think the main point of contention is the notion that price is a fungible value based on local economies, rather than the worth of the object in and of itself. That feels intrinsically unfair to many of us at a visceral level because it seems like a violation of the social contact (that implicit agreement that society is a level playing field and we are all held to the same account).

Let me use your example to illustrate. You posit:

With arbitrary game prices and an anti-piracy stance, what justification is there for tricking the pricing system? A creator (again, I'm being charitable), setting the price, says "I spent my time and money investing in my education and then making this thing that you're interested in. I gave up years of my life, and I ask that you honor this with a payment of [say] $10". What justification is there for "Nah, I'll get that other guy to click the button and pay you $2 and feel ohsoclever about it", compared to outright piracy? At least piracy doesn't (usually) tax the infrastructure intended for paying users.

The problem is that the creator is in fact saying "I'd really like you to pay $10 for my game, unless you live over here, in which case I'll gladly accept $2.". Now I understand that this is a consequence of local economic realities - $10 in one nation does not buy the same quantity of things that it does in another, even after currency conversion. And I also understand that regional pricing is a genuine, if imperfect, attempt to redress these monetary discrepancies.

Where people have a problem with it is that it feels unfair on a personal level. This is something you touch on as well, that the pricing is set based on rough economies rather than individual prosperity. And this is where is typically comes into play for most users.

We as animals have a powerful innate instinct fairness. Scientists performed a test recently where two dogs were given rewards of different quality for performing the same trick. The dog who was receiving the inferior treat eventually stopped performing the trick once it worked out that other was getting preferential treatment for the same effort. I suspect that regional pricing feels the same way to many people, especially young people with minimal purchasing power of their own. They see that they have to scrimp and save to buy a $40 game where someone else can pick it up for $10. The economic reality that $10 to that other person is just as out of reach as $40 to them is lost. All they see is the endpoint, and to them it appears grossly unfair.

I have stated before that I don't have a problem with fair pricing. What I do have a problem with is its current implementation, which is deeply flawed and handled in a such a fashion that it tempts people to circumvent the system. That unfortunately is one of the more pernicious aspects of capitalism - it favours easy systems that inconvenience the genuine customer over a complex solution that actually addresses the matter. For example, I buy DVDs rather than pirating them, and I'm the one who has to put up with tons of unskippable bullshit at the beginning of each that the pirate has already removed.

Every time they try to control what they can't control, they further alienate those who act in good faith.

I know very well what you're trying to say, and I wholeheartedly agree with you, but I think the example you gave doesn't prove your point at all. A mid-class American kid gets pissed off at the fact that a Russian lad can buy the same game for 1/4 of the price he paid, without realizing that the Russian guy might need maybe twice the time it took him to gather that money? So what? Should we abolish regional pricing to avoid annoying first world brats?

I think a better example would be this same mid-class American boy getting pissed off at the fact that the son of a Russian millionnaire can get his games at a much lower price than what he has to pay. In that case he indeed has a legitimate reason to be angry (just like I am, btw).

You are correct, my example in this case falls into the same trap as the presumed reasoning behind the current pricing scheme. Namely, that $40 in one country is as out-of-reach for everyone as $10 in the other country. Obviously this is not the case, and is in fact the reason why so many people find the pricing scheme offensive. It treats the problem on a national economy scale rather than on a personal economy scale.

But again, this is one of the weaknesses of capitalism in its current incarnation - it favours the sledgehammer over the scalpel when devising "solutions".

Yes - regional pricing works to the advantage of richer people in poor countries and the disadvantage of poorer people in rich countries - but price discrimination on a personal level isn't in the buyer's interest either.

Stratagems that maximise profits are seldom fair, and usually come with concomitant evils. I think there is a solution which occupies the optimal middleground, but I believe that most companies have very little interest in discovering it.