Marcomies: I have always liked and supported GOG and I can understand, if not appreciate, you willingness to change you principles to make more money by getting bigger release titles at your site. If these changes truly only affect new big publisher games that
could not have made it to GOG catalog otherwise, I can definitely live with it and maybe even buy some of them here for the sake of DRM freeness. In that case most of our fears would have proven wrong but can you really answer all these questions now to prove our worries to be unnecessary:
Can you promise that only new, big publisher releases of new games will be affected by regional stuff?
TheEnigmaticT: No, I can't; contracts come up for re-negotiation all the time, and when they do there's no telling what may happen. I can promise that we did not go into this change with the intent of re-pricing swathes of our catalog of classic games in a manner that's unfair to gamers around the world. I can promise you that we will strive our utmost to keep things fair for gamers everywhere in the world. But I'm not gonna make a promise on something like this and then find in 18 months or 2 years that things turned out differently than we had thought they would.
Marcomies: Can you promise that Europeans will not pay 9.99€ for the same old games that Americans pay 9.99$ for. That anyone can pay in whatever currency he/she wants to if the game is not one of these "regionally priced" ones?
TheEnigmaticT: Ah, that's pretty much a no regardless. Either a game is regionally priced or it's not. We're not going to have a "choose your own currency" system in place for games, because that strikes me as complete insanity for the end user to try and manage.
Marcomies: Can you promise that you won't start distributing different version of games for different regions, providing certain games only for some regions and region locking gift codes or installers?
TheEnigmaticT: As above, no. We can't promise this. We can promise that, especially for back catalog, we have no interest or particular intent in trying to offer regionally-changed titles. But we've already been forced to offer censored titles before on GOG.com, and there's no telling if it will happen again.
Marcomies: Can you promise that every game (big, small, old, new...) from now on won't be released with regional prices and you just raise your hands in the air and tell it's out of your hands?
TheEnigmaticT: Yes, actually. This announcement is indicative of a relatively small change in our current catalog offering. A small change that we believe will end up making a big shift in the titles that we are able to offer you. But we will never simply assume that regional pricing is the way to go. For newer games, there are frequently in-place agreements that simply cannot be circumvented that relate to competitive pricing in various regions of the world--think of mysterious examples of when we offer games that oddly don't seem to stack up to what you find on Steam for the same price and you can probably track down some examples where this has happened to us in the past--but particularly for classic games these agreements are substantially less common. For those games in particular, we will fight as best as we can to secure fair pricing everywhere in the world.
Marcomies: Can you promise that GOG will never accept any game with any sort of DRM into its catalog for any reason?
TheEnigmaticT: Yes. Well, provided that you don't call anything in the cataog already something with DRM, lest I break this promise before I even get started.
and mostly unevasive answers.
Marcomies: ps. For the sake of mutual respect between you and your customers, don't try to feed us shit and call it candy, even if you honestly think that it's particularly good shit. The message I quoted here was the message you should have posted on the news, not the one about "Good news!" and "more good news!". I don't appreciate it when I'm being talked to like some media-illiterate toddler and I doubt anyone else here does either.
TheEnigmaticT: Well, here's the thing--and I've seen a lot of people echo this comment--it *is* good news. I think bringing Divinity: Original Sin and many other games that are fantastic examples of their genre to GOG.com is exciting. I think the fact that we're offering them for the same price as any other store in the world means that we're not necessarily directly competitive on price, but that's okay because selling on pricing is never a smart play in the long term. I think the fact that we care enough about our gamers to offer free games to you guys at our own costs--and that we have already gotten contractual agreements to do so in place for three games--should be good news to you as well.
You can buy a day-one game like Divinity: Original Sin from any store on the 'Net for the same price, but if you get it from GOG.com you get a free bonus game from us--and, of course your DRM-free copy of the game. We thought it's cool that we can do this, and while this kind of change is scary for both us and you, we thought that making a big change like this is something that will pay off in exciting new opportunities for GOG.com and the gamers who come and hang out here.
I'm not peeing on your head and telling you it's raining. It's more along the lines of "for every silver lining there is a cloud."
I admit that I said this pretty harshly. My main point was not as much the content of the news as it was the way it was told. Surely you can see that the announcement was extremely upbeat marketing speech and told the things as if they were all unambiguously good thing for everyone, yet a day ago most GOG believers would have thought that the answer to the questions I asked would have been yes.
As many people here have said you have given a lot of honest and straight answers to our concerns about the future of GOG within the legal limits you have. The problem is "for every silver lining there is a cloud." should have been in the starting paragraph of the announcement.
GOG is all about mutual trust and respect, a childish attempt to hide that cloud and only show those lovely silver linings displays neither. You don't have to follow the obsolete and disrespectful corporate tradition of trying to put everything in the most positive way possible, even though no-one at this day and age buys into it. You are better than that (I hope).