TheEnigmaticT: Sorry you feel that way (and man, it took a long time to read through the thread updates since Saturday). I can't say a whole lot about our plans for this because of NDAs / it's not the messaging that we've agreed upon with partners. What I will say is: maybe you should see how implementation for this works before you throw the baby out with the bath water.
Also: we've been paying attention to all of the comments in this thread (and had about an hour-long meeting about it this morning). Guillaume is writing a more in-depth explanations about what exactly we're planning on doing with regional pricing in the future. I think part of what you guys see as the disconnect between the tone of the messaging that we have here and how you feel is that you don't know all of the details for what we're planning. Regardless, we'll be posting something more in-depth tomorrow about this. Hopefully you (and the rest of the folks here in the forums) will be able to rest substantially easier once he's had his say.
All right, was saying I just moved you straight from the strong support list to the boycott list and won't bother with anything else, but let's try a somewhat more reasonable message after just letting off a bit of steam Friday. This is darn difficult, mind you.
Regional pricing for on-line sales is wrong. There's absolutely no excuse or justification for it. For physical sales there are varying taxes, transportation costs, the shares taken by the various shops themselves and wildly varying bills, rent and wages those stores have to pay. On-line, nobody can argue that it costs 0.01 USD to send a certain number of bits to the US and 5.46 EUR to send it to the EU for a 19.99 USD / 19.99 EUR game (even 0.46 EUR would still be entirely unreasonable, if it'd be 19.99 USD / 14.99 EUR), and let's not even mention the even more outrageous situation for Australia / New Zealand. Hence, publishers merely do it because they can get away with it, there's absolutely nothing that can be said to justify it
or your choice to give in to this.
When you gave in for The Witcher 2, it was as a result of a court order, after a lengthy court battle that you lost, and you tried to make up for it with some store credit and even "broke" the geo-IP for a while to allow people to pick their location when buying that as well, which incidentally was an even greater plus for those same Aussies who had even worse problems than pricing to worry about. In that case, you fought for us, the customers, and alongside us, and even though you lost one battle, you did what you could to make it so we won't lose it as well. And it was just one battle in a war, it happens, moving on.
Now, however, with this announcement, you did not lose a battle, you simply surrendered in the war, and contrary to what you said, you are pissing on our heads and telling us it's raining. As that video people have been sharing proves, only last summer you were saying this will never happen, that if you ever allow for any dent in your values that's the end of GOG, and
just two months ago someone from support told me regional pricing will never happen, and now... There is
nothing you can say to justify this or make it tolerable.
Nothing! You had two clear, specific, core values, DRM-free and flat price worldwide. You gave up on one of them. It's not a question of slippery slope, of potential consequences to the no-DRM stance in the future as well or anything else, not right now and not specifically at least. It's a question of betraying one of your two core principles, and therefore
betraying us. And hiding it in a so-called positive announcement, hiding your traces by making that video private, trying to justify it in who knows what way now is
not making it any better, but
worse.
As I saw someone else put it at some point on here, people like sales, coupons, free stuff, etc. everywhere, but people love
d GOG. You
were the good guys, you fought for us and we fought for you. Some people bought dozens or even hundreds of games on here (even if on big sales) just to support you, not because they absolutely wanted them, and definitely not because they needed to get them legally anywhere. Others shared your news, your offers, your announcements, supported you in other ways, persuaded friends and acquaintances to join GOG, make purchases as well, spread the word even further. It wasn't a client - store business relationship, it was an emotional attachment because it truly felt as if we were in this fight against the other, evil, businesses in this industry together. And you now proved not to be the case. That's a betrayal, and the reaction to this, the rejection, will be just as emotional and vehement and steadfast as the support used to be, and possibly even more so.
If you were so desperate to get publishers too rotten to allow for fair prices for some of their games in one shop among several, just to count the major ones, you could, at the very worst, make an entirely separate site, without any visible connection to GOG, ran by an entirely different team, that would sell just those games, and leave GOG as it was. That'd have still been a blow, but it'd at least have been something else, wouldn't have soiled GOG directly.
If you truly believe you'll get many games like this, you could still do that. Once you get, say, 50 or so under those terms, new, DRM-free but not fair priced, make another site, selling just those games, without negatively affecting GOG. Guarantee that GOG will maintain its principles, so including the fair flat price one, and still get at least 150 new releases per year (100 from the old two games at least three years old per week rule, rounding down to give a week off during the summer sale and one during the winter sale, and 50 more to justify the fact that you decided to stop focusing just on those "older" games some time ago - which incidentally started the slippery slope that led to this, mind you), and put the others on said other site, with the rule that they may not stay there with non-flat prices more than two years after being included in the catalog or more than three years after launch, whichever comes
first. Then, once you can get a publisher to accept flat pricing for one of those games, move it to GOG too, but if you can't get such an agreement before the game is on that other site for two years or three years have passed since it was first released, whichever comes first, it will be removed from that other site and forgotten about, since the point wouldn't be to cater to rotten unreasonable publisher demands forever, but just to provide a gradual way in for them towards a fair model. And either way name and shame, spell out precisely which publisher made this rotten demand and what they said to your attempts to persuade them otherwise.
Again, this other site idea would still be a blow, would still be a betrayal, but not as much of one and at least it'd be a betrayal by CD Projekt (which won't exactly be a first if you recall the going after Witcher 2 "pirates" bit or the fact that they just signed a distribution deal for Witcher 3 with the same rotten <bleep> who forced you into the regional pricing for Witcher 2), not by GOG.
Sorry for the length, but... I guess that's as reasonable as I can get. Adding
any game on GOG with regional pricing, or of course adding region locks or other such things that may follow, is
not tolerable under
any circumstances. Period.
Signed.
But I'm really looking forward to the official post tomorrow.
- GOG.com chose "flat-pricing" as one of their core values.(Just like DRM-free)
- GOG.com wore "flat-pricing" like a badge, to distinguish them from the competition.(Just like DRM-free)
- GOG.com used "flat-pricing" as advertisement, so that customers bought in their store, and not in others.(Just like DRM-free)
) saying what a Ripoff regional pricing is, GOG.com want's to make a 180° turn.