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Good Old Games — the digital store for retro games — just announced a new service called GOG Galaxy. It’s a DRM-free online service designed to offer auto-updating, cross-play, and an optional client for your PC games.
Kinda like Steam. Minus the DRM. This could be interesting.
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GOG should have used something in relation to this:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/06/ea-game-sale-makes-fun-of-steam/
“A new client that you will actually want to use.
Your forced DRM games can wait. This is the real deal.”
But Gog has never been cocky. They have been listening to fans and make decision for players interest unless they are pushed to the corner like how Australia is forcing them to add Australia tax into their game and they will give free games to compensate for the high price.
Long live Gog!
Australia is forcing them to add Australia tax into their game and they will give free games to compensate for the high price
Actually it was not Australia, it was some distributors that demanded their Australian region prices be enforced. I don’t know why GoG caved in but it was not the country, it was a publisher.
And the person that profit from Australian region prices are the distributor itself and the government receives higher tax charged on buyer. That is why regardless of what the government is saying about getting us to evade paying absurd prices, they could have easily put the hammer on companies and forced them to change the price by updating the fair trade act but they won’t bother because they are getting a piece of that pie.
Only thing we can do is VPN away and buy that the price that should have been.
The GST the government would receive is chicken feed compared to the distributor. And that is implying it can be collected.
There are actually a set of rules the determine if GST is to be charged and later collected. And in the case of GoG I think there is a loop hole where a distributor can force a regional price but as the transaction for GoG is most likely one off shore, the GST does not have to be forwarded to the Australian Tax Office.
Then again, I’m no accountant so I’m open to being wrong. But it would not surprise me if the GST doesn’t apply due to the nature of GoG.
Around these parts ‘Australia tax’ is used colloquially not to reference any particular tariffs but as a way of describing the purely voluntary mark-up that publishers impose on selling anything to Australians. Even if there’s absolutely no difference in the cost of delivery, such as… the change of an IP address on digital delivery.
The primary reason for ‘Australia tax’ is the cosy relationship between publishers and their distributors/retail. Physical goods cost more to ship to and sell in Australia (with our higher wages, smaller bulk-orders, and out-of-the-way logistics), so they get marked up a fair bit.
And because the publishers aren’t usually dealing with the retailers directly but with distribution agents who used to be necessary to untangle all the regional laws/tariffs, the distributors get a cut as well, which makes the final retail price much higher than ‘US retail price plus individual unit shipping direct to Australia’ by a customer. This is where a lot of the hidden ‘Australia tax’ goes.
Once that inflated cost is settled upon, with the leeches getting their cut, the retailers and distributors then demand that the publishers not sell the digital copies any cheaper than the retail copies, for fear of having to compete in an area they can’t reasonably compete in. The publishers can’t risk having retailers not stock their product (because they are still a large market share), so they capitulate.
This works out pretty nicely for the publishers, though.
If a product they sell in the US for $60 is distributed for $60 digitally in the US, the publisher will make more money on the digital sale than the retail sale, because the retailer isn’t involved in the digital sale. So it’s more profit. Let’s say $30 of a US retail sale goes to the publisher, $60 of a digital sale goes to the publisher. If retailers in Australia need to sell games at $90 instead of $60, and the publisher price-matches their digital copies to the retail copies, the publisher gets $30 of a retail AU sale, and $90 of an AU digital sale. So they’re not exactly crying at getting three times as much profit from an AU sale as a US sale.
Those prices aren’t even accurate, either. Not all the extra on top of a US price is going to the retailers or distributors. Sometimes they mark it up just fucking because we’ll pay it. To paraphrase Microsoft when the government dragged their asses into an inquiry as to WHY they fuck us on pricing: “We charge what the market will bear.”
This is why digital AU sales are utter bullshit, and why software companies who experience piracy are not exactly ‘innocent victims’ as much as they are bullies whose victims have fought back.
About time. I would have been using GOG for years but I love the Steam client. I don’t mind paying a dollar or two extra for !valve, but you have to make it easy for me to use.
Looks like I’m going to have a third online service running. At least I like two of the companies involved.
I don’t leave more than one running at a time unless I absolutely have to, and by preference it’s Steam – I make pretty heavy use of its chat/friendlist functions, it’s our default voice-chat platform etc.
So for that reason, I usually resent EA for forcing me to use Origin AND Steam at the same time to play their Origin-exclusives, or not allowing the Steam Overlay.
I’m guessing that won’t be a problem with whatever GoG’s cooking.
“Their own version of Steam” meaning “something almost totally unlike Steam”, then?
(I can’t watch the video yet, but I’ll comment anyway)
Huh? I thought GOG already was an alternative to Steam… How are they going to tie games to a client without it being DRM?
Well, this could be a good thing. It would make downloading games less of a pain in the ass.
I hope it has a better interface than Origin.
Stupid name though. Good Old Games Galaxy? GOGG? The ‘Galaxy’ term has too much association with Samsung. I would have named it Good Old Games Orion, or GOGO.
Good Old Games Ultra?
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