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Hey, GOGgers,

We're not perfect, we're exploring new frontiers, and we make mistakes. We thought DRM-Free was so important that you'd prefer we bring you more DRM-Free games and Fair Price was less critical and that it could be sacrificed in some cases. The last two week's worth of comments in our forums (nearly 10k!), show that's not the case. We didn’t listen and we let you down. We shouldn't sacrifice one of our core values in an attempt to advance another. We feel bad about that, and we're sorry. Us being sorry is not of much use to you, so let’s talk about how we will fix it.

One: DRM-free forever. Abandoning fixed regional pricing means it will probably take longer to get some games, but you've made it clear that sacrificing fair pricing for more DRM-free games isn't acceptable.

Two: We will adamantly continue to fight for games with flat worldwide pricing. If that fails and we are required to have regional prices, we will make up the difference for you out of our own pockets. For now it will be with $5.99 and $9.99 game codes. In a couple of months, once we have such functionality implemented, we will give you store credit instead, which then you will be able to use towards any purchase and cover the price of it in full or partially. Effectively gamers from all around the world will be able to benefit from the US prices.

This will apply to every single game where we do not have flat pricing, such as Age of Wonders 3 (full details here), Divinity: Original Sin, and The Witcher 3. If you remember the Fair Price Package for The Witcher 2, this will be exactly the same.

Three: We still intend to introduce the pricing in local currencies. Let us explain why we want to do it and how we want to make it fair for everyone. From the very beginning our intention was to make things easier for users whose credit cards/payment systems are not natively in USD. The advantages are simple because the price is more understandable and easier to relate to. There would be no exchange rates involved, no transaction fees, and no other hidden charges. However after reading your comments, we realized we have taken an important element away: the choice. In order to fix this, we'll offer the option of paying in the local currency or the equivalent in USD. This way, how you pay is always your choice.

Four: You are what matters, and we will be sure to involve you all more in what we're doing and why we're doing it. Let's start by meeting you at GDC - we’d like to invite you to meet us face-to-face Monday the 17th at GDC. Obviously, not all of you can come to San Francisco, so we want to invite all of you to an online event with us early in April to ask us whatever you would like. More details soon.

The bottom line is simple: there may be companies that won't work with us (although we will work hard to convince the most stubborn ones ;). Yes, it means we might miss out on some games, but at the same time GOG.com will remain true to its values and will keep on offering you the best of DRM-free gaming with Fair Prices.

Once again thank you for caring so much about GOG.com. We will work hard not to disappoint you again.

--Marcin "iWi" Iwinski & Guillaume "TheFrenchMonk" Rambourg
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CharlesGrey: And I agree that it would have been nice to simply leave the choice with the users, as with the first pre-order title they introduced. Those who were against it simply didn't have to buy it. Now I feel like this could be a missed opportunity to expand GOGs gaming library with some recent or semi-recent high profile titles. And yeah, how ever small or big this "vocal minority" may have been, they pretty much made the decision for everyone else. :/
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Thar: Why don't you think they've made decision based precisely on economic outcome of AoW3 preorder?
That's one thing I was wondering about, actually. But even if the sales of that game were bad, it's not necessarily ( solely ) because of the regional pricing situation. I was under the impression that many people were either expecting a more "impressive" pre-order release, or that they simply never heard of the game before and weren't really interested either way. ( I'm more or less in that last category myself. I've seen the older games of the series here at GOG but never played them, and it wasn't a title I was actively looking forward to. )
Yes, it means we might miss out on some games, but at the same time GOG.com will remain true to its values and will keep on offering you the best of DRM-free gaming with Fair Prices.

=)
Attachments:
Post edited March 11, 2014 by gamefood
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jase23: ...I agree with your previous position of prioritizing the addition of DRM-free games to your catalog, and not worrying about the price being exactly the same in every country. If you are in Denmark or Germany and you get a great price on an excellent DRM-free game from GOG, better than the price you could get anywhere else, then why should you care whether or not someone in the USA gets a slightly lower price on the same game? ...
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Trilarion: I guess it's not GOG that cares but the people who have to pay more. It's not just envy, it's also just not wanting to pay more - which I can fully understand. Probably customers in Denmark of Germany will now buy much more often on GOG than anywhere else and that will give GOG an extra income while the regional pricing is still there.

It now looks a bit more balanced between the addition of DRM free games (which is still possible even with regional pricing) and the compensation of price extremes. At least the customers here will embrace it. $1=1€ was just too extreme for us.
But what people aren't getting is that this will pretty much only affect the games that were going to be fairly priced already- just priced locally. Just as they are doing with AOW3, they could have offered that same offer, kept regional pricing, and been able to get more offerings to go DRM-free.

I understand where people are coming from when they speak about a difference in price- I'm not ignorant of what that means. I also understand that some people don't want new games, or indie games, or AAA titles. But there are a lot of us that do want those- just as many as those that want the USD pricing. And just as that silent bit of the population was marginalized by the tyranny of the loud masses and their threats to take their money and run rather than trying to see how things were going to shake out, there's money already being left on the table. I prefer DRM-free. But, I'm not a stickler for it, as shown by the extent of my collection on Steam. And if a game comes out on Steam, with only Steam as DRM, and it's not on GoG because of the negotiation time or the fact that the developer wants to wait b/c of the regional pricing hit... I'm going to get it on Steam. And I'm not the only one. And when GoG gets it, I'm very unlikely to purchase again. And so, it's where I find myself- with my Old Game catalog pretty full of the old games that I want that GoG provides, I find myself purchasing less and less from GoG...

But hey... I wasn't loud and complaining about it. And truthfully, I'm not complaining now. Just pointing out that there *is* another side to this equation, and before this is declared a win, you might want to consider the adverse effect that this time to market on games, and selection in the catalog has been having on GoG already...
My question is this; what games are we now never going to see on GoG due to this decision? The return of the Fallout series? System Shock 1? The new Obscure series re-release that happened on Steam? I for one was willing to pay more if it meant more options...

/2cents
Thumbs up, GOG. I didn't whinge about your policy change in the other thread, but I was also someone who was much less likely to buy from you after you removed your 'flat pricing worldwide' policy.

Making up the regional differences in store credit gets my thumbs up.

Allowing people to choose either local or US currency for non-regionally priced purchases gets my thumbs up.

I'm still a little concerned about the probability of regionally locking games and regional censorship though, which are other issues regional pricing will bring, and will still take place despite the new game credit policy.
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BKGaming: I never claimed one way or the other honestly... I just said that those complaining were not the majority. Without a poll we will never know. I have seen plenty from those countries more concerned about not having more choices than paying more. Are there more that care about regional prices over in those countries...sure probably. But those that do care more about DRM free gaming would be grouped with us who wasn't affected by regional prices that also still care.
No doubt that the forum community is a minority compared to the paying customer base of GOG. And that's exactly the reason I think that the compromise (because that's what it is, not a 100% reversal) is the result of sales data and projections.
I'm pretty confident that no matter how loud some voices on the forum were, if the sales went as projected/ expected, they'd have gone with their initial plan.
Thank you.
Sincerely, thank you.

I was rather severely disappointed (& extremely concerned) that we were losing what seemed to be the last bastion for fair-priced (& DRM-free) games.
(Humble Store went the way of regional pricing shortly before GOG announced their plans to, & it seems everyone else is already happily ignoring the way it disadvantages non-U.S. gamers.)
Especially since you made it one of your core principles & actually made a video mocking the practice.
(The sort of practice that's not really great publicity if you later reverse things.)

If it means you maybe can't get certain groups on board without a bit of work (though you can certainly hold up sheer volume of backlash to the concept as a reason why maybe they'd generate some positive feedback and greater sales by being fair) then that's okay.
If it means you can't get them at all.. well, I wouldn't want you to land yourselves with no chance of ever getting them on your side, but perhaps a subtle suggestion as to whom is refusing to feed the benefits of globalisation back to consumers would be good.

I mean, you really- like, I'm surprised you're offering to cover it out of your own pockets?
That's something else.
Are you sure?
I suppose you know what you're doing and carefully worked it out, but.. don't risk wounding yourselves.
DRM-free, fair pricing, and your continued survival = What we really want.
I Whant a Unicorn!!!!!
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StormHammer: You make it sound as if no other regional-priced games will ever come to GOG.com. That is not my understanding, based on this paragraph:
i wonder also. But the following quotes, from someone fully in the know, gives credence to my concerns.
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GOG.com: One: DRM-free forever. Abandoning fixed regional pricing means it will probably take longer to get some games, but you've made it clear that sacrificing fair pricing for more DRM-free games isn't acceptable.

The bottom line is simple: there may be companies that won't work with us (although we will work hard to convince the most stubborn ones ;). Yes, it means we might miss out on some games,
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JohnnyDollar: ...It doesn't sound like a total reversal, more of an alteration. ...
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Trilarion: Yes, it's definitely not a U turn. More like a compromise where everyone has to give a bit.
So an L turn? ;)
Glad you went back to your core values
thanks gog
What a great day!

Glad to see you back with us, iWi !
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BKGaming: Well lets see... they have close to 100K likes on Facebook, over 60K followers on twitter and only around 10K replied on the forum all together. They also get I believe around 2 million hits a month. So yes that not the majority...not by a long shot.

The difference is you had a choice... you didn't have to buy that new game that was regionally priced. You could have waited for a sale. Instead of being sensible it turned into complaining, complaining that could end up costing every GOG user games that we could have possibly gotten and $$$ from GOG.

It not about who get benefits and who doesn't, by all the complaining you replaced having a choice to blatantly having a decision made for us all rather if we suffer from regional pricing or not. And it's not just the ones not suffering from regional pricing that didn't want that choice taken away, I seen plenty of gamers from regionally priced countries that would have rather had the more choices in DRM free games than being compensated for the price difference.
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CharlesGrey: Thing is, when they say 10K replies, they're not even talking about individual posters but the total amount of posts on this topic ( at least within the primary threads related to this topic ). I think we can safely say that many of these posts are by the same people, since the threads went on for a while. Not to mention, the count also includes posts by people who were actually in support of GOGs new policy all along, or at least not actively against it. So how many individual anti regional pricing posters does that leave us with? About 1K? Kind of puts things into perspective...

And I agree that it would have been nice to simply leave the choice with the users, as with the first pre-order title they introduced. Those who were against it simply didn't have to buy it. Now I feel like this could be a missed opportunity to expand GOGs gaming library with some recent or semi-recent high profile titles. And yeah, how ever small or big this "vocal minority" may have been, they pretty much made the decision for everyone else. :/

I don't even want to go on with this topic, though. Seems like the choice has been made, and we'll have to see what good or bad that will bring for the future.
Yea I agree... and I agree what is the point going on with this topic... said what I got to say really.
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adamhm: Regional pricing would make it more likely that GOG would be able to convince some of the big publishers to try going DRM-free, and if a publisher/developer decides early on to release a DRM-free version of their game then it's not such a big deal to develop their game to work fully without Steam. On the other hand, if a game is planned to be Steam-only then naturally they'll take full advantage of Steam for things like multiplayer in order to reduce development costs & it will be highly unlikely that any future DRM-free release of said game will have those features intact - and that's *if* a DRM-free release happens at all.
I still don't follow - how would promising regional pricing reduce development costs?
ha ha ha, so amusing, this :)

first the forums were all like "blah, regional pricing, I'm never buying at GOG, you suck, where are your principles?!"

so GOG gives up and says ok, if that's how you feel, we won't

and the forums go like "man, GOG, why did you give up so easily, nobody tells you what to do, we want our great new AAA titles" :D

if I were a GOG worker I'd be pretty pissed off... as a mere GOGer I can't help but say this community has changed tremendously since this whole business started...

at least GOG didn't change in things that matter, they're still awesome, helpful and wiling to please everyone