Australians might want to pick up Witcher 2 on GOG
In a fairly cheeky response to the Australian ratings board's censorship of CD Projekt's The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, digital distributor GOG has updated its privacy policy to allow users to decide their own location when making purchases, rather than having their location tracked by IP. Shoppers living in Australia can sidestep the censorship (as well as the bizarre price hike to $69.99 AUS that came about due to "licensing issues") by setting their country of origin as ... well, just about anywhere else.
In a sly press release announcing the privacy policy change (posted after the jump), GOG Managing Director Guillaume Rambourg said the site "has always been about trusting the user," explaining, "We've come to the conclusion 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." Well, to be fair, we'd consider "paying more money for a censored game" to be a fairly troubling issue.
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WARSAW, POLAND. May 9, 2011 -- The dashing digital download dudes who run GOG.com ( http://www.gog.com) have decided to change the way they do business, in light of customer response to the Witcher 2 preorder. They have decided that they will not use IP addresses to determine a customer's location for game purchases and downloads.
"GOG.com has always been about trusting the user," said Guillaume Rambourg, Managing Director of GOG.com. "We've come to the conclusion 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."
Users who are finding problems with their country's location (and the offer they are presented with) in their settings. They can update this by going to "My Account" and clicking on "Account & Settings."
The change is now live on GOG.com for all current purchases and preorders.
About GOG.com
GOG.com – or Good Old Games – is the ultimate destination for classic PC games. The site offers gamers some of the greatest PC games of all time for a low price and free from copy protection. GOG.com is much more than just another digital distribution site, featuring an extensive community component that allows players to rate, review and discuss their favorite PC games, as well as insightful articles from respected game journalists. Visit www.gog.com and start your journey into the past.
