Posted September 15, 2016
It's weird though, cause a lot of places that use to do only USD that also now have CAD, are at least competing with steam and selling for less a lot of times...only GoG doesn't seem to try.
Like, never been more unsatisfied with buying Witcher 3 off here instead of steam, could have gotten the xpac so much cheaper for steam.
Let's examine the facts:
Fact #1:
Current prices as of this moment on Steam and GOG:
Witcher 3 Game of the Year Edition (Steam) $69.99 CAD
Witcher 3 Game of the Year Edition (GOG) $69.89 CAD (10 cents cheaper than Steam)
The GOG version of the game additionally gives $7.90 CAD off the price of the game in GOG Wallet funds as a part of their "fair price package" as stated directly on the store page for the game:
"$7.90 OFF ANY FUTURE PURCHASE. You get free Wallet funds (our Fair Price Package) to offset the regional pricing."
That brings the already cheaper GOG price of the game down from $69.89 to $61.99, exactly $8 (11.4%) cheaper than Steam.
Fact #2:
Original base game prices:
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Steam) $55.99
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (GOG) $55.89 (10 cents cheaper than Steam)
Fair price package applies to the original base game also:
"C$6.30 OFF ANY FUTURE PURCHASE. You get free Wallet funds (our Fair Price Package) to offset the regional pricing."
That brings the already cheaper GOG price of the game down from $55.89 to $49.59, exactly $6.40 (11.4%) cheaper than Steam.
Fact #3:
Expansion pass prices:
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Expansion Pass (Steam) $24.99
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Expansion Pass (GOG) $24.79 (20 cents cheaper than Steam)
The GOG price of the game is 20 cents (0.8%) cheaper than Steam. Not sure why the GOG store front does not show the fair price package for the expansion pass, but it could be just a website glitch/accidental omission. Would need Judas or some other GOG employee to confirm whether or not the fair price package applies to the expansion pass or not also. Either way however, it is still 20 cents cheaper than Steam. That is not much, but it is 20 cents cheaper and definitely not "more expensive" than Steam as has been claimed.
Fact #4:
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone (Steam) $10.99
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone (GOG) $10.99
The Steam and GOG price is exactly the same, therefore GOG is not more expensive as claimed above.
Fact #5:
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine (Steam) $21.99
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine (GOG) $21.99
The Steam and GOG price is exactly the same, therefore GOG is not more expensive as claimed above.
Fact #6:
While it was indeed true that GOG did not offer CAD pricing to Canadians when this now ancient thread was originally written, only a couple of months later GOG added support for the Canadian dollar for Canadian customers. Canadians have now been able to choose the currency they wish to use and switch it back and forth at any time between CAD and USD. Not only are all of the GOG prices for The Witcher 3 games and expansions not more expensive than Steam, both the original game and expansion pass and the new GOTY version of the game are cheaper on GOG than on Steam, and the price of the individual expansions is exactly the same as it is on Steam.
Fact #7:
When shopping on GOG from Canada in USD funds, the USD prices shown to Canadians on GOG are often cheaper than the USD prices shown to customers in the USA. This is because GOG decides to eat up the exchange rate so that we do not have to pay a higher price than someone in the US does, also as a part of their attempt to have fair pricing. I'm not aware of any other store that voluntarily decides to lose some of their profit margin on a game in order to try to hide the costs of exchange rate for customers in other countries. To the best of my knowledge Steam does not do this, nor do any Steam resellers at least in any way that I have ever personally seen shopping anywhere else.
Now, are there any games at all in the GOG catalogue that are more expensive on GOG than on Steam by a few cents or a few bucks? I don't know of any off hand but I'm sure there are and I'd be surprised if there are not. But, are there any games on Steam that are more expensive on Steam than they are on GOG? Damn right there are. The fact of the matter is that prices vary slightly from store to store on individual products just like they do in Walmart, the grocery store or any other store. Games are not all "more expensive on GOG so GOG sucks and I'm never going to shop there again", nor are they "more expensive on Steam always so Steam sucks and I'm never going to shop there again". Sometimes a game is a slight bit more expensive on one store or cheaper, and at the same time the reverse is true for some other game. Why? Who the hell knows, there are a lot of variables, but spotting one game at a higher price once and thinking that every game on that store is always a higher price than on some other store is simply not even bothering to do simple research that takes mere seconds to find out.
http://www.isthereanydeal.com has a complete price history of every game on every store going back several years and one can compare the prices of all games on every store and find out who has the cheapest price at any given time in any of the supported currencies including sales promotions. Any sane rational person who cares to look into the pricing of games will find that on average all games are about the exact same price everywhere no matter what store you shop at, however that individual games may be priced slightly higher or lower depending on a variety of factors, and possibly even due to pricing errors. To not realize this is to simply not bother doing any research into the matter at all and form bias from possibly other reasons unrelated to pricing.
But in closing, if you're going to re-open a forum conversation that is dead for 6 months which was concerning a feature missing from the store (the former but no longer lack of CAD pricing for Canadians) to complain about the prices of a particular game being higher on GOG than on Steam, you should at a bare minimum click on the store pages of the game on both GOG and Steam and find out if the assertion you are making about the pricing of the game is actually correct, which in this case it is not even remotely correct as I have shown.
Now if you're a real anti-GOG Steam fanboy, you'll ignore everything I just said and go rummaging through the GOG store to find some other game that happens to be more expensive on GOG than on Steam and come back and say "There! See, this game is more expensive so I'm not shopping on GOG because they don't care, they're not even trying to be competitive!" and we'll all yawn here and go find 5 other games on GOG that are cheaper than they are on Steam, then yawn again.
At the end of the day, who really gives a crap though, shop wherever you want that tickles your private parts in the nice way. At least have the decency to not reopen 6 month old irrelevant forum threads to make bogus complaints about your biases though.
