Cav's Place

After the significant changes implemented on August 27, the regional-pricing floodgates truly opened on GOG.com. In fact, at least two dozen games that used to be flat-priced before those changes suddenly became regionally-priced as of that moment, without this being announced or explained in any way, a couple of GOG.com employees merely apologizing for it when pressured by the community. 35 games were also removed from the catalog a few days later, as their publishers demanded regional pricing for them as well but GOG.com didn’t accept those terms as they were older and they claimed to only allow this for new titles back then.
Since then, the number of regionally-priced entries in the catalog grew to 72, though 11 of those only have lower prices in some regions, most notably in Russia, nobody paying more than the standard US price. Worse, if initially any new regionally-priced release was specified as such in the relevant news post, after a while they started to “forget” to mention this, only adding the notice and apologizing after several complaints were posted, and then, as of the November 20 release of Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, they changed the wording of the release announcements to no longer specify a standard price or include any mention of regional pricing if applicable. In addition, on December 4, two of the games that were removed over regional-pricing disagreements were added back on the publisher’s terms, so there are regionally-priced older games in the catalog now as well.
As such, we now need to rely on the relevant MaGog search, which gets updated automatically twice per day, or the forum thread and related mix, which are updated manually by someone who over the past few months turned from one of the leaders of the “resistance” against regional pricing to saying that he’ll continue to provide information for those interested but having the entire catalog switch to this pricing model is unavoidable and attempting to keep fighting against it is pointless fanaticism. And there’s my mix as well, aimed at those who want to extend a potential boycott to the actual companies that back this change instead of limiting it only to the specific games it currently applies to. Keep thinking I should make a thread for this, but don’t know if I will because I don’t know if I’ll keep updating it when I’ll no longer be able to add to the post I’m currently using for this list.

That said, all of my respect and support for GOG.com, which was truly enthusiastic at one point, went down the drain. However, I’m rather out of alternatives, since I know of no such shop that still rejects both DRM and regional pricing. ShinyLoot has flat prices but offers an increasing number of games with DRM, merely allowing users to filter them out instead of taking a stance against the concept. FireFlower Games, which I only recently learned about, seem to share GOG.com’s strict anti-DRM stance and also claim to donate half of their annual profit to projects that benefit the environment and game development, but they add a VAT that seems to be fixed at 25% for customers from European Union countries, even if they’re based in a European Union country themselves, namely in Sweden. DotEmu may stick to DRM-free games, but they have no issues with applying regional pricing to the entire catalog. And Games Republic, which never had any stance regarding DRM, also seems to have recently switched to the standard regional pricing model for their entire catalog after initially advertising flat prices. And none of these ever supported any payment method that I could use anyway.
As such, GOG.com remains the only such store I can look towards, in the sense of still being somewhat less evil than the rest for the time being, but definitely nothing worth supporting in any way anymore, which does make me look towards “the high seas” once again. On the other hand, some developers may be worth supporting, so I may still consider purchasing games from them if neither the developer nor the publisher have any games on GOG.com that are regionally priced in a way that causes anyone to pay more than the standard price, but if before these latest changes my price limits were 10 RON for impulse purchases and up to 50 RON for games I’d really want, now I’m saying I won’t normally touch games that cost more than 10 RON unless they’re at least 80% off, and even then the absolute upper limit will be 35 RON and it’d have to be something I’m sure I want to buy. And these price caps refer to the total amount I’d end up spending, including Paysafecard‘s hardly negligible currency conversion fees, so today 10 RON would mean $2.52 or €2.11, while 35 RON would mean $8.81 or €7.39.