From MaGog's logs for 3 February:

That's interesting! One day after its GOG release, Thea: The Awakening completely changes its regional pricing scheme (see previous three posts up).

* Regional price for Thea: The Awakening is $21.79 instead of $19.99 in regDE, regIT, regCH, regNO, regSE, regMC, regCZ, regPL
* Regional price for Thea: The Awakening is $21.69 instead of $19.99 in regGB
* Regional price for Thea: The Awakening is $13.89 instead of $19.99 in regAU, regNZ
* Regional price for Thea: The Awakening is $9.99 instead of $19.99 in regMX, regBR
* Regional price for Thea: The Awakening is $5.49 instead of $19.99 in regRU, regUA, regUZ

How "lovely"...

Well, this really sucks as I could get it yesterday during stream, now price is impossible.

Wonder if that was a change of heart, or GOG messing up.

The latter, I would guess, as the new scheme now more or less matches Steam's.

More or less? Is this because of GOG not offering all currencies available to Steam users or something else?

More or less, because I didn't check every region, just looked at a few representative ones, so didn't want to commit.

My hypothesis is that a game publisher decides to try GOG's way of pricing first, then perhaps on day one of sales they see 432,342,480 copies of the game sell in Russia for 1/4 the price it is in the US, while only 1,000 copies sell in the US, then start seeing their game up for sale on random websites heavily discounted, then decide "ok, that isn't working for us, everyone pays the same USD price regardless of where they live or their ability to pay". This is just pure rampant speculation on my part however so take it with a grain of salt unless some official source can confirm or deny it. It could just be a pricing screwup or something else.

I know if I were a game publisher and entertained GOG's 'fair' game pricing and saw a very heavily disproportionate number of my games being sold in one country that gets the lowest global prices, and that many copies of the game were sold to individual account(s) in large enough quantities, I would do something to shut that down rather quickly too. The problem though is that there is no real way to price games that is "fair" for everyone globally and also fair for the publisher to not get ripped off without someone out there feeling disenfranchised along the way.

From MaGog's logs for 3 February:

NOTE! CHANGED Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders [Upcoming], reg_price_full, regRU: $6.49 ***TO*** $7.79
NOTE! CHANGED Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders [Upcoming], reg_price_full, regUA: $6.49 ***TO*** $7.79
NOTE! CHANGED Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders [Upcoming], reg_price_full, regUZ: $6.49 ***TO*** $7.79





* Regional price for Craft The World is $8.99 instead of $18.99 in regMX, regBR
* Regional price for Craft The World is $5.19 instead of $18.99 in regRU, regUA, regUZ

mrkgnao, would it be possible for you to add support to track regCA price changes for Canada also? We're charged in USD currency, but the price we pay is lower in Canada than in the US even though it is in USD. The GOG website screws up the gog_lc cookie in the browser randomly so it's impossible to know if the correct price is being shown or not, and only some games appear to give preferential pricing to Canadian customers to cover exchange rate differences so it's hard to know what the correct price for a game ever is. If it's possible to track it somehow like you do with other countries though, the pricing changes should show up here as a reference point for CA_USD_en customers.

Not sure how many games in the catalogue are affected, but The Witcher 3 related ones are for sure as an example.

MaGog has been tracking regCA since 21 March 2015.

Here are all the (4) games that have a different price in Canada:
[url=http://www.an-ovel.com/cgi-bin/magog.cgi?ver=703&scp=gdspuri&dsp=ipgfsorlcmbahTP&ord=&flt=pra~ca~&opt=n]http://www.an-ovel.com/cgi-bin/magog.cgi?ver=703&scp=gdspuri&dsp=ipgfsorlcmbahTP&ord=&flt=pra~ca~&opt=n[/url]

P.S. Concerning your reply to HSL above, I don't think you've looked in detail at the nature of the change (from to [url=http://www.gog.com/forum/general/good_news_price_updates/post826]here)

Grain of salt or not, I don't see how any of what you're saying has anything to do with the specific game, and the change that was introduced a day after its release.

The game was, and still is, heavily discounted in the regRU, regUA, regUZ regions, so what exactly is being "shut down rather quickly" by increasing the price in those regions that had to pay the same as the US a day earlier?

And are you suggesting that devs/pubs get sales data on a per user account basis?

Thanks, magog only shows The Witcher 3 related titles but I have seen some other games pricing fluctuate between US_USD_en and CA_USD_en also, although I did not take specific notes or have a list. Due to the nature of the pricing problem on the website when it happens it is not possible to do an A/B comparison or always notice a price discrepancy right away, but I'm keeping my eye out for it. I had just hoped that there might be another way to just get a list of all the CA_USD_en and US_USD_en prices in one shot, both for regular prices and promos as well. When I notice any manually however (usually notice some during sales promos), I'll pass the information I find along though if you like.

I did look but I mistook the data, more on that below...

Concerning full prices, I am pretty confident that there are no other games (bugs notwithstanding).

Concerning sale prices, there is most definitely some minor variation of prices among regions (not only CA), since, in true GOG fashion, the rounding scheme (to the nearest 9 cents or 4 cents or whatever) differs from region to region. I have seen many games where the full price is identical in, say, US and DE, but the sale price differs by a few cents. It usually involves a delta of less than 10 cents. Anyhow, MaGog reports it all in its logs and I ignore it and do not post here, as I consider it of little interest (not that this thread would win a popularity contest, anyways).

Ah, that's easy to explain. My use of the phrase "... that a game publisher ..." is indicative that the hypothesis was being made in a generalized manner and not to any one specific publisher lest it have read "... that the game publisher" instead. To be clear though, it was indeed a general hypothesis based on observing certain data output from MaGog into this thread, however I did in fact misinterpret some data (from multiple games, not any particular one) which I used to base the hypothesis on. More on that below.

Yes, after both mrkgnao and your comments I went and re-reviewed the specific game in question as well as others above in the forum that I had observed similar changes on. At first I did not see what mrkgnao was suggesting I missed so I was puzzled, but then I noticed the following:

"* Regional price for Tropico 5 is $5.89 instead of $24.99 in regRU"

The order of the low price and high price and the exact wording are different than some of the MaGog posts such as:

"NOTE! CHANGED Quest for Infamy, reg_price_full, regUZ: $5.49 ***TO*** $3.19"

So I got the before and after prices mixed up on the first example because of being used to seeing the latter example where the order the pricing appears in the text is reversed in the text but the actual direction of the price movement is the same. It mistakenly appeared to me that the price of these games had increased, whereas that is not the case as I see from re-examining the information.

So, my hypothesis is obviously incorrect for some of the games in which I thought I observed something different than what is actually happening. If the numbers were indeed reversed as I mistakenly thought they were though, I think the hypothesis is reasonable, not that it really matters much mind you. :)

I do not have any level of knowledge about what sales data GOG gathers and/or makes available to their partners unfortunately so I'm not able to make such a specific claim (nor have I). I think it is reasonable to believe that publishers do get access to some amount of sales data with which they may use to spot pricing mistakes and correct them, to determine pricing changes and other metrics. Whether or not they make detailed information available on a user account basis to publishers however, they certainly have that information available to themselves and if they spot an account purchasing large numbers of orders for the same game over and over as gift codes then I'm willing to bet a high stake that they have software in place to detect that and report it to a human being (a GOG employee or otherwise) to investigate and make a judgment call about it. They'd be foolish to not do so since they know very well that there are opportunists out there that try to do this very thing. Do I have direct knowledge that they do it? Nope, not even the most remote slightest hint. That's why it is my hypothesis and not stated as a matter of fact. :)