Cav's Place

Watched CD Projekt‘s “Spring Conference” three days ago and the plans revealed in the part that had to do with GOG.com made me want to send them an e-mail with a few comments. However, I didn’t do it so far, so I won’t have that as a “skeleton” to base this post on, but I’d like to write it to explain what I was thinking about anyway. Perhaps I’ll even manage to write and send the e-mail afterwards, doing it the other way around and summarizing the post into the e-mail instead of expanding the e-mail into the post.

So everyone will know what I’m talking about, I’ll say that I’m referring to their decision to create new price points, namely $14.99 and $19.99, in order to be able to offer newer games. In itself, that’s very reasonable, but when you look at the specific games that use these new price points and see how much they sell for in other places, you’ll start to notice a problem. Granted that it may be too early to get a good idea about what will end up happening when at the moment there are only two games with a base price of $14.99 and two others with a base price of $19.99, but when people are correctly pointing out that you can purchase The Whispered World and Assassin’s Creed (Director’s Cut Edition) elsewhere for half the price, if not even less, something’s very wrong.
In their defense, GOG.com representatives state that their releases include a lot of additional content, in fact calling the games that will be released for $19.99 “Premium Editions” and making sure to stress that the bundled soundtracks alone would otherwise cost about half as much as the entire bundle costs if purchased from them. However, while this would explain the price in these two cases, it means that, instead of getting the “free goodies” that GOG.com is known for, the customers will essentially be forced to pay for the sountrack as well even if they’d only want the game, which is terribly unfair and just plain wrong.

Now this “higher price than elsewhere” issue isn’t new for GOG.com, as some of the games that they sell for $9.99, and perhaps even some of those they sell for $5.99, can be found for less elsewhere, but most of those are old games that they patched in order to work with newer operating systems and drivers. As such, they aren’t only selling the games themselves but this service as well, and for that they have every right to charge an additional fee and add it to the price, especially since the unpatched games themselves could otherwise be unusable or nearly so. However, this is not and probably will not be the case for these newer and more expensive games, as these will generally require no such patches.
What’s worse, I’ll say that in most cases it’s only these more expensive games that they’d even need to justify the prices for, because I personally consider anything up to $10 to be a pretty fair price to pay for the downloadable version of a game that you actually want to purchase, regardless of what other offers are available. I could overthink it and say that it’s probably a perfectly fair price for great single games up to about ten years old and for good ones up to about seven years old, but the price itself is fair and could be maintained for even older games if they’d be bundled with others and/or with expansions, each additional title increasing the maximum “age” of the bundle by up to 50% of the initial value, the exact amount depending somewhat on its quality and length. Yes, that’d also imply forcing people to pay for things they may not actually want, but those things would actually be other games instead of content that’s likely to only be valuable for true fans and collectors. Plus that, as I keep saying, $10 is a fair price, so I can simply look at it in terms of how much can I get for this amount of money, even if I’d only “get” the knowledge that my purchase would support a distribution platform that I otherwise like, while when the price exceeds $10 I’ll be trying to see how little can I pay for the specific game that I want.

Of course, if I’m talking about how this affects me personally, it’s quite obvious that at this point it doesn’t affect me at all. No matter how much I’d otherwise want to support GOG.com for the fact that everything they sell is DRM-free, for all the effort they put into making these older games available and playable, and for their attitude in general, I still can’t purchase anything from them because they only accept credit cards and PayPal, which I don’t use and in fact actively boycott due to their “blockade” against WikiLeaks, but this is an issue for another time. My main concern right now is that this new direction of theirs, which I supported when it was first announced and then liked even more when I noticed that the first of the newer games they added were indie titles, may turn them into just another evil distributor, even if we’re talking about a kind of “evilness” that’d be noticeably different from that displayed by the others.
To put it bluntly, I am not and will not be willing to pay extra for digital collector’s editions of games, particularly if they’ll sell for more than $10. When talking about games that I’d actually want to purchase legally, if they’ll finally meet those in my situation halfway someday and provide some “two steps from cash” payment methods, as I call them, I’ll probably be willing to pay a little more in order to purchase from them, whether because their version is guaranteed to be DRM-free or even simply because my purchase would support a distribution platform that I otherwise like. However, I certainly won’t be willing to pay twice the price of the game itself just to get some additional content that I’ll probably have no use for. So keep this in mind GOG.com: For these newer and more expensive games, I’m quite sure that most people won’t consider it a violation of your business model if you’ll leave out any additional content that you can’t add to the bundle for free. However, forcing people to pay more simply because you want to only sell what essentially are digital collector’s editions significantly mars your image as being a very fair distributor that treats customers right…