Say GOG and Flush: Region Locks
Just days after I wrote that long post dealing with the first year since they suddenly decided to give up on one of their two clear, specific principles and allow regional pricing, GOG.com stooped even lower and decided to start blocking people from purchasing games based on their location. More specifically, two days ago the preorder for Hotline Miami 2 was added to the catalog and people from Australia don’t even see the game page, because the game is banned there, while yesterday the German version of the site went live and at the same time people from Germany were no longer able to purchase the Commandos games, the only explanation given being that selling those games in Germany is a serious crime and they don’t want any trouble. Worse, this explanation was only given after people discovered the issue and complained, as initially they once again attempted to keep it quiet.
The interesting thing is that several other games in the GOG.com catalog are banned in Australia, but they have no problem selling those to everyone, and also that it apparently wasn’t any sort of crime to sell the Commandos games to Germany until yesterday, though they were added to the catalog back in 2009. Also, quite a number of games can only be sold in one or both of these countries in a special censored version, but apparently offering the uncensored version is not, and hasn’t been, any sort of problem either. And, at least according to what quite a few Germans posted on the forums, the second and third Commandos games were never banned in Germany to begin with, only the first having that fate.
Not that I’m trying to give them any ideas, of course, but this makes absolutely no sense unless you see it as yet another rotten decision buried under “good news”, and likely in preparation for something worse. After all, first the “good news” of bringing preorders and day-one launches of bigger games was used to attempt to sweeten the blow of introducing regional pricing for supposedly a small number of titles, then the “good news” of multiple currencies was used to attempt to sweeten the blow of extending regional pricing to a significant part of the catalog, and now the “good news” of localized versions of the site is being used to attempt to sweeten the blow of a few regional restrictions. I guess we can now expect to see a large number of such restrictions hidden under some more “good news” in a few months, possibly along with, or after, blocking gifting regionally-priced titles to users in regions where they cost more than the price they were bought for. And then, of course, more and more are expecting some sort of DRM to rear its ugly head once Galaxy will actually be launched.
Sadly, with ShinyLoot also allowing titles with DRM, FireFlower Games adding VAT to the price for users in the European Union, DotEmu and The Humble Store using regional pricing for all titles, at least the latter also applying regional restrictions, and either way none of them offering payment options I can use, I still have no other options to legally purchase games. But, of course, I don’t have to, and I did quite fine without doing so before GOG’s principles got me off “pirating” games completely…
