The Witcher 2 Geo-IP Policy Change, New GOG Publisher Signed

There are a couple of pieces of important news to glean from CD Projekt’s Good Old Games website today, including the fact that “>all users’ country of origin will now be determined through Geo-IP tracking when they attempt to purchase The Witcher 2, per court-issued orders following their loss to Namco Bandai. Essentially, this means that new purchases (old purchases won’t be affected) will require the user to download the version designated for their country, including any censored content that might bring:

GOG.com has stated for a long time now that we believe that the best security is asking only for the minimum of information that we need to successfully transact business with our customers. Our opinion is still that including things like determining your location via Geo-IP, because there are several possible flaws with that system. However, in order to keep selling The Witcher 2, we will need to implement a Geo-IP based system for determining your location, per the orders of the court.

We will be implementing this system immediately; you will see that your local currency’s price is now featured on the product page when you visit it, based on your IP address. Since we’ve already announced the price for this game would be the same flat price everywhere during the Holiday Sale (which ends on January 2nd, 2012, at 23:59 EST Time), we’re not going to change the pricing for the Witcher 2 until this sale ends.

We remain committed to user privacy and keeping your information as safe and secure as we can. Further, while your profile’s location is, by order of the court, determined via Geo-IP when you purchase a copy of The Witcher 2, you can still set your country location for the forums as you would like, and your location doesn’t matter for buying any other games on GOG.com.

If you have already purchased your copy of the Witcher 2, we won’t be changing anything on your already-bought copy, just as if you had a boxed copy on a physical shelf instead of a virtual box on your GOG.com shelf.

I suppose you could still connect to the site through a proxy if you’re really persistent, though. Anyway, how about some good news? According to their “letter to Santa”, the GOG folks have signed on a brand new publisher whose identity will be revealed soon:

1. We still love classic games, Santa. We want to bring more of our top publishers to GOG.com, and we’re happy to say that we’ve finally gotten all of the paperwork and preparation for our next big new publisher finished. We hope that our gaming fans will be as excited by the incredible classics that we’ll be bringing to you guys soon, as we have been getting them ready to release.

2. We’ve already stated publicly that we want to bring newer games to GOG.com, but we want to do so in the GOG.com spirit: lots of goodies, DRM-free, and at a fair price everywhere in the world.

3. We also would love to bring more completely new day-one releases to GOG.com, also in the GOG.com spirit. We think that the GOG way of distributing games represents a great way for developers to respect their audience (the people who buy games), increase sales, and maybe even help change how the gaming industry as a whole treats gamers.

4. And finally, Santa, we always ask for more. More fans. More great conversations on the forums. More fun contests with fantastic entries from our users. More ways for our users to interact, and for us to reach out to them. More great games, and more great interviews with industry legends.