Newbie: Is the flat pricing the $60 USD = $60 EUR = $60 GBP kind of deal or different?
What other values did they *used* to uphold, if I may so ask?
Cavalary: Flat pricing means the exact same price anywhere. as you pay when you buy a physical product from anywhere. If the game costs $60, you pay $60, whether you're in the US, Australia, UK, Russia, Romania, Brazil, China, South Africa, Indonesia or wherever. Either only charge in USD, as GOG did before regional pricing, or if you give the choice of multiple currencies (but not the obligation of using the local one!) make the conversion at the day's rate. There are a handful of flat priced games left on GOG, those on
this list plus a few more not covered yet on MaGOG due to the legacy mode, like Warlords 1+2, Warlords 3 and Clash. Before 2014, that was all of them, and it was the second clear, specific value, or "pillar", of GOG, stated everywhere.
The other values weren't stated so specifically, but the policy, and what you kept seeing in their interviews and presentations, was to make it worth it for the customer, provide a better service than the "pirates" that they recognized as their competitors (actually stating repeatedly back then that they're not competing with Steam or other stores), by adding extra "goodies" to all games, providing complete editions that are fully patched and possibly getting additional fixes on top of the latest provided by developers, and going above and beyond in terms of support.
Newbie: Wait...so all of this was because they created GWENT?!
Cavalary: CDP left it to GOG to manage the infrastructure for Gwent, which of course means a whole lot of added costs, both financial and in terms of workload for developers, support and equipment. Which meant both less resources left for the store and the need for an increase in income and a reduction of costs from other sources, leading to this drive for rapid growth at the cost of values.
Newbie: Age of Empires you didnt need a cd key to play multiplayer. counter strike, you didnt need a cd key to play multiplayer....what are you talking about?
Cavalary: Huh? AoE was never on GOG. I was referring to the first games GOG sold, like Neverwinter Nights, where the GOG version did require a key for multiplayer all along.
paladin181: Da fuck is wrong with you bring back a year dead thread to argue with people who most likely don't remember making those points to begin with?
Cavalary: Sure was wondering the same...
Yes, now I remember... I do remember they set this shop up specifically to fight pirates because they reckon the reason people pirate is because of drm and how publishers treat their paying customers.
As for the GWENT debacle, I'm assuming they've still not been able to recover the costs?
AS for the AOE quote, you said
Back in the day it was, say, needing a CD key for NWN multiplayer, now it's on-line checks and Galaxy, but DRM is DRM.
to which I replied with AOE didn't require any of the sort when playing multiplayer, giving an example of a game that was drm free even in multiplayer. The only drm that it had was, actually two, was a cd key and requiring the disc to be in your disc drive so it could load the game up. Otherwise you can just not need the disc anymore after install(Unless you have the original AOE 1 which streamed the midi music from the disc requiring you to keep the disc in the disc drive to get music playing in the background whilst you control your empire...).
And for why I brought back a thread from the dead, well I just answered that before your post if you bothered to read... Oh "was", so I guess you're not wondering anymore...heh.
Newbie: Interesting....is there a list or someone keeping track of these "partial drm free games" anywhere on the forum or elsewhere?
Klumpen0815: The link to that is right there in your quote?
Unless you mean something else and I misunderstood.
Ah yes, I must have missed that when I posted it...sorry.