I hope Namco-Bandai wasn't the lowest bidder or something.

Wow, I see I missed a flurry of posting and tons of up/down repping :). GOG really is damned if you do, damned if you don't. If a game takes too long to get released on GOG, there are posts bitching about that in the release threads. Now some games will be released on launch, albeit with a caveat, and posts bitching about it.

There is one very easy way to not allow this to affect you, regardless of where you live: DO NOT buy games on launch! Do you really need to play that game *right now*? Especially when so many of us have huge backlogs?

The real problem stems from publishers. They are the ones who control the prices. Avoid supporting the system these publishers have in place by not buying their games full price and instead wait until they are deeply discounted. Maybe then they will change their policies. Of course in reality, it would require a huge majority of people to act as one which will never happen. But at least you can do it on a personal level, just like you are taking a stand against DRM by buying DRM-free games.

Like your Zod image :P

Thought so :)

So basically because physical distributors force AAA studios and smaller publishers to sign contracts stipulating regional pricing - much like what happened to CDPR with TW2 - and the bigger AAA publisher are often also the distributors who insist on regional pricing, you guys decided to drop one world pricing as your pillar (which was more than just a feature, but one of your main pillars) in favor of allowing regional pricing. Not much of the cloud mentioned in the original post ;) Seriously I'm American so I'm not affected by this, but if you do follow industry standards on regional pricing, you're going to allow a lot of your Eastern/southern European, Australian, and NZ customers to get price gouged. So I can understand why they are so upset as they thought you wouldn't do that to them.

What about using VPNs? Last I checked using one is technically legal but against EULA for some giant like Steam and they can likely afford to ban people that try to use them (or do they even bother?).

I doubt this will affect me much. I buy games that are relatively cheap so if I have to purchase a 5-10€ instead 5-10$ that's not the end of the world but at least some good can come from this by completing some series like Tom Clancy's I saw was mentioned that likely wasn't able to arrive due to flat prices rather than a DRM issue.

And I also agree that as long as this site keep DRM-free they should expand. The problem will be when we'll have to track what games are or not.

Nice Enigma nIce ;) and thanks for teaching me a new word today. Conflate... i shall have to figure out how to slip that into my science diploma somewhere ;)

Tell that to the fanatics who are only further encouraged to do crap when they see companies using such things.

Okay then bring Silent Hill 2 to GOG and i'll forgive you. :p

There is already spam offering fake passports. Those could be handy in circumventing regional pricing.
You've got to give it to those spammers, they sure react fast. :-)

Translation: Every game in the catalog will eventually be regionally priced, as and when the contracts come up for renegotiation. Since it is now an option, every publisher will insist on it in the future.
Doesn't really matter what you will assume, does it? The publisher will always assume it is the way to go.
Given that you just broke your promise not to introduce regional pricing, that's really not saying much. Granted, at this point, nothing you can say can really assure me of this.
Well, I think you were well aware that many of your loyal customers would disagree, and so, regardless of whether you think it's good news for GOG, trying to pass it off as though it would automatically be seen as good news by all of your customers is quite patronizing and disrespectful.

I'm probably going to get toasted for this, but so does this announcement. :B

Actually I wasn't presenting it as a choose one over the other and you automatically don't care at all about the other. The intention was presenting it as here is a list of things that are important to people and two of them are DRM-free and regional pricing, and everyone has to choose which of the two items is most important to them personally when it comes down to opening their wallet. If one has to decide between the two, which one would you choose?

If one chooses to not buy a game because it has regional pricing then that is more important than the DRM-free benefit of the game to the person - regardless of how important DRM-free is to them. DRM-free is more important to me personally, and I don't care either way about regional pricing or not and that includes whether I am affected by it or not. If one chooses to say they are both equally important to them they still have to make a decision as to whether or not to purchase a given game that comes up if it is regionally priced. If they decide that they would have bought the game - if it was global pricing but they are not going to buy it because it is regionally priced, and if the game is DRM-free in both cases, you eliminate the common factor between both options - the DRM-free aspect and you're left with their decision being based on regional pricing and ultimately proves to be more important to them which is what my scenario is suggesting.

I do care about the price I pay for my games and will continue to buy or not buy them here based on what I think is a fair price shown to me. If the prices shown to me on a given game are higher than they would be with global pricing I wont know, but I will know if the price is reasonable to me to pay for the value I perceive in the product regardless of what other people might be paying for the same product. If I perceive the price to be too high, it could be because it is just a price that I think is too high outright, or it could be because regional pricing has priced the game outside of the window I'm willing to pay and I wont buy it.

As for the perception of pricing being the same everywhere being fair, what's fair? People in different countries make diffrent levels of wages, have different taxation, have different cost of living, different unemployment rates, different distances to travel to work, and a multitude of other factors in such a way that $20 USD will vary from being pocket lint to some people, to being someone else's life savings in another part of the world. What would be "fair" could be argued to be prices that are geared to income and in the currency local to the individual, indexed pricing. That wouldn't work out for a multitude of reasons really. The fact is, life isn't fair, and before GOG came along to begin with gamers had pretty much next to nowhere to turn for DRM-free games or classic titles that work at all on their computers. If GOG or some site like GOG didn't come along and change this, everyone would either be stuck with draconian DRM in perpetuity and end up deciding to not buy or play games ever, or they'd be buying the games DRM encumbered with various restrictions etc. and grumbling about it, or they'd pirate the games. But they have the option to get a whole tonne of games at good prices DRM-free on GOG.com and it sounds like they'll have the opportunity to have even more in the near future, and possibly first day AAA titles to boot.

That's a future I consider brighter than limiting the catalogue to 10000 new $5 indie games per month, and if it means there is regional pricing, as much as that sucks it is a minor issue compared to the problem that DRM plagues upon the world IMHO.

It's good news to me. Means more newer games.