Seeing how the USA is 5 positions higher than Germany in the PPP list, it would actually be "fair" by the logic of those people for them to pay more und not us:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?year_high_desc=true

I'm still shocked how much bullshit by greedy CEOs people willingly swallow.
Whelp it's convenient as long as you come out as the winner, I guess.

Small but secure niche ? what secure niche ?

I have the feeling that a lot of peoples don't really know what that mean, for something to be a "secure" niche you don't just need to chose some "nichy" thing and roll with it; for example if you decide to only sell games with title starting with the letter "Z", it will definitely be a "niche" but definitely not a "secure" one.



For a niche to be viable you need to do something that nobody else (or very few) does and to have a big enough market for it, Gog niche used to be : selling old games DRM-free, they didn't really "create" anything niche they were only selling somebody else old property.

The problem is that it wasn't a niche, more a bubble, It worked and was viable for a time because at the time were Gog started nobody cared about old games neither Steam nor even the publishers/right owner, so having a shop asking to buy old license for game that were no longer sold was interesting for publishers as they had nothing to lose.

But by being successful Gog effectively killed their own niche because they showed right owners that there was actually a market for old games and that basically if they wanted to make more money with their old games they could simply...well... sell them on Steam.

That's why we saw more and more old games, often games that were Gog exclusive, being sold on Steam, sometime even being sold on Steam months/years before being released on Gog.

That's also most likely why companies like Devolver manage to get rights for older games rather than Gog, because for a right owner selling a game to Devolver mean having the game on both Steam and Gog while selling it to Gog means having to... well... only Gog which is only a tiny fraction of Steam market share.

Personally, even though it's a pure speculation on my part, I guess that the reason why Gog decide to concentrate on more recent games, even if it means dropping some of their "values" in the process, is not because of some evil money hungry conspiracy but simply because they understood that their "old games niche" was dying and decided to concentrate on "DRM-free" games instead, regardless of their age.

But of course with recent games came all the issues of region restriction, local prices, patches, DLCs, etc...

Except it was always the case on Gog, I don't know if you have very selective memory or you just weren't there at the beginning but it was always made perfectly clear, since the very beginning, that the DRM-free guarantee only applied to the single player part of games and not the multi player. It has nothing to do with Galaxy and it's not some recent decision of some evil ceo.

It's a business plan, the target audience for such document don't care about DRM-free and most probably don't have a clue what it means.

Also often those document concentrate on "new" things you plan to do, how you will develop etc... Gog has been a DRM-free store for nine years now, it's not exactly a exciting new thing worth mentioning in a bullet point.

I also fear that Cyberpunk 2077 could be the final blow on what GOG has been.

Sadly, the way GOG is going, I doubt I'll buy anything from here at the time Cyberpunk 2077 will be released.
There have been too many bad moves recently, followed by complete lack of transparency, to be just ignored.

OFFTOPIC: Since region locks have been mentioned:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/optional_age_verification_eg_for_german_users
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/vote_against_german_version_of_gog_with_censorship

Well, I for example am not primarily looking for old games on Gog. But if right owners profit more from selling their old games on Steam and there's no real reason to have them on Gog, what exactly is the incentive for them to sell their new games here?
I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing the logic here. To me Gog isn't an old-drm-free games-store, but a drm-free game's store. That is the niche as I'm seeing it. And it is a good one indeed, since having looked at good alternatives due to recent developments, there really are none. It's definitely working.

Again, I'm not sure I understand where you're going with this - selling the rights is selling. Regardless of whether you put the game on Steam, Gog, or cover it in bubble wrap and put it in your closet, that isn't really what should concern the seller - I'd assume that this is more about the money you can offer. I wasn't aware Gog was really in the business of buying IP anyway, I know there have been a few cases, but I wouldn't consider it a major part of Gog's business model.

It might have something to with "old games" being limited in number whereas that isn't the case for "new games" ;)
I also haven't heard anyone complain about new games being sold on Gog. Unless you take "new" to mean - always online multiplayer (only) games (possibly with microtransactions)? Those two aren't synonymous by any stretch of the imagination.

It reads as if he thinks "new games = AAA games" and disregards indies to a degree.
For me too GOG always was primarily a shop for DRM-free games and not only for DRM-free old games and I was very happy when they started selling indies.
What I find sad is, that at some point their curation shifted in a strange direction. Although we have EA and Ubisoft games here and now also all this online DRMed stuff (at least the multiplayer parts) we still don't have excellent DRM-free indies like Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, English Country Tune, The Bridge, Cave Story+, Cook, Serve, Delicious!, Vertiginous Golf, , [url=https://www.humblebundle.com/store/knytt-underground]Knytt Underground, Super Meat Boy and many others. Aquaria, Braid, Bastion, World of Goo, Limbo etc... arrived extremely late here too.

Because even if Steam is 90% of the PC market share and Gog only 9% (purely made-up numbers), covering 99% of the potential market is still better than "only" covering 90%. Rights owner don't lose anything by selling their game on Gog too, of course as long as they agree to remove the DRM.

When Gog was originally created, it was a DRM-free old games shop exclusively, it's only a couple of years ago that they move from selling only older games to also selling recent ones.

Some peoples "resent" Gog for moving from being a "old games only" store to being a "old and new" one, mostly because it forced Gog to make some sacrifices and forget some of their old values, for example before there was only two prices world wide for all games : $5.99 and 9.99$, no regional pricing, no region restriction for games banned in some countries, etc...

"selling" was not the right word to use, I meant giving Gog the right to sell the game exclusively, for some time, on their platform, they are more interested into finding solutions to sell on both Steam and Gog, so "lending" the rights for some time to another company that will make the game work on modern system and sell it on both platform is more attractive than having Gog do it.

They are actually pretty common, peoples complaining that Gog no longer care about old games and prefer to sell Indy instead, or that because they want to sell more and more new games they will start adding DRMs tomorrow (and that therefore it would have been better if they had remained in their old niche of selling only old games, etc...)

Yes, I got that impression as well (not to put words into anyone's mouth though).

Sad but true. Is that really about curation, though? I thought it was mostly due to lack of publisher interest - which, funnily enough, I guess is going to increase once Galaxy becomes... less-optional?

True, but according to their own clarification (definition?) given in their Q1 2017 financial statement [emphasis added]: What constitutes cumbersome access restrictions is fairly subjective.

And since you've already mentioned GOG's "mission statement", add also GOG's "business objectives" I can't help but think that this line from The GOG.com Mentality: is misleading, at best.



While that may be true for the most part, for their BP to be successful they also need a customer base that will support their plans. So when I read "GOG.com mission statement" and "GOG.com business objectives" in their publicly available Strategy, a few things are quite telling as to where they want to take GOG, and what customer base they want here.

It''s their company, and they may take it any direction they want, of course, but my business, and possibly that of others, doesn't come unconditionally.

I see. And yeah, that's fairly obvious, really. But in your other post you seemed to be confusing what is a publisher and what is a store. Gog doesn't own nor publish the games sold here (apart from a few minor exceptions). But I see you arrived at the same conclusion ;)

Gog is only a couple of years old. When I joined it was already selling newly released games. So, since it came out of Beta in 2010, it's been doing this for roughly half its lifetime. It might be time to get used to them selling new stuff along with older games ;)
While some people may resent them, I'm certainly not one of them, and the complaints I have heard are always "sell more old games", never "stop selling new games". I really don't think that anyone is taking serious umbrage to that.

The region restrictions didn't come with the new games, though, but with the implementation of "regionalized storefronts" - and I'm still doubtful that move was necessary. Although the implementation of region locks might have been inevitable, it's certainly not about new games - almost all of the games you can't buy from Gog when situated in Germany are ancient, which is why I picked them up before the region lock dropped.

The regional pricing is just a maximize-profit scheme. While it did arrive along with "new games" one might wonder about the correlation vs causation. I do have my suspicions that it was more or less about Gog becoming a more viable option for those "low price regions" first and foremost.

I really think that's not the actual context. I've not seen anyone mentioning "new games" (in general) in the recent rage threads, for example. People are annoyed about particular issues, not Gog selling new games at all. And I think that exactly this stance, "a game released in 2017 is bound to have drm" is toxic, regardless of who says it. Of course someone might talk about "the good old days", but that's just like saying "when I was young children still played outside" and probably to be taken just as seriously ;)

Well Europe has VAT taxes. That is on y'all. The Communists and Socialists in this country (the Democrats) are pushing for that here too so your cost is higher. If you live in a more rural area in America your internet access is usually slower and American prices for internet is more expensive than Europe, but nobody from the US asks GOG to subsidies internet costs.

Money values are different. Fair is free-market pricing Y'all in Europe also have ridiculous EU light bulb nonsense and added costs we don't. This chart also shows the difference in fuel taxation among countries, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuel_tax_in_OECD_countries,_2010..png]This[/url] is why you also pay through the nose for fuel. Should BP, Shell etc be required to subsidies the cost too?

What do internet costs have to do with this? I'm not asking people from the US to pay my rent for me because I live in an expensive neighborhood either. And might I point out that not all people "in the EU" have stellar internet access that only costs pennies?
You (possibly) realize the "EU" is not a country and VAT varies between different states? Germany actually has one of the lowest in the Eurozone. Many other non-EU countries have VAT as well, e.g. Ukraine.
Since when has free market pricing been about fairness? And how is this a free market if I can't buy the game for half what it costs here from my friendly Russian neighbor?
Thanks "y'all" for enlightening me that I should pay more for games because I already pay more for petrol and something something lightbulbs.

i WILL buy Cyberpunk 2077 even if became uPlay exclusive (ugh!)

And you just answered for yourself the reason and what I pointed out originally. Different countries, different laws, different taxation, different business regulations, different operating costs, etc. is why you get different prices and region locking.

And the graphic for the gas taxation was pretty obvious to show the difference of how the exact same product in different countries are different prices. The fact you failed to see the comparison or decided to willfully ignore the fact that the tax alone on a gallon of gas in Germany is more than I pay for a gallon or gas (petrol) with tax in the USA is your own ignorance.

You should be well aware that Mein Kampf was banned for sale in Germany but freely available in the USA, Canada and other countries - you know region locked.

Why is the drinking age in Canada 18 or 19 depending on province, but 21 in the USA? Same beer. different countries but different prices and different laws.

The list is endless.

That's a very speculative question. Is Cyberpunk 2077 a single player game? If so then I would probably not buy it if Galaxy was also mandatory. If it is a multi player game or if only the multi player part requires Galaxy, I may consider it. After all, almost all multi player games nowadays requires some sort of authentification/DRM. It would depend on how good it is and for accepting DRM (even if only for multi player) it needs to be really good.