Yesterday we spoke to the Managing Director of Good Old Games, who flat out admitted that region based pricing for digitally distributed content was unfair. Now, quite possibly as a result of the Australian Witcher 2 fracas, Good Old Games has now updated its privacy policy and will no longer use Geo-IP to determine your region.
“We’ve come to the conclusion,” reads an official statement, “that there are a number of issues with using a customer’s IP address to determine what offer they are being presented with from GOG.com. A good number of users can find themselves negatively impacted by a policy of using geo IP to set their region.
“For example, customers may be travelling when they want to purchase or download a game from GOG.com. In this case, automatic IP address capture might change the price or the content of the game they’re ordering (such as the default language of the installer). Further, geo IP data collection is not always right. IP addresses are not a perfect or unique identifier of location, and can report the incorrect region of users, particularly ones who are not using standard Internet connections. Finally, we’re always very sensitive of our users’ privacy. Effective privacy protections for our users means that any data that we don’t need to collect, we shouldn’t. We only need to know the country that you’re making this purchase from, so although we originally planned to use geo-IP to determine user’s location, we’ve decided to trust our users and let them inform us as to the correct region for their purchase.”
It’s probably worth noting that Good Old Games hasn’t stop region based pricing, but now has no means to force it on you against your will.
Now, essentially, the choice is yours.
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