The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, PC – £11
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, PC – £11
To purchase this, clear your cookies for GOG.com, then use Hola unblocker access the above link from Ukraine. Hit “Pre-order now”, then disable Hola. Log in to your account, reactivate Hola, click to go through to payment via Paypal, and deactivate Hola once you’re on Paypal. Complete the payment, and you should be done.
Do not enter any sensitive data whilst Hola is active. The game you will receive is region free.
I can’t get this to work, it still lists uk price even with hola.
And you made sure you have your cookies cleared?
Yep, cleared everything. It’s still full price either in pounds or dollars.
I just updated the instructions, I’d missed out a step.
Thanks, that worked. Just hoping they don’t cancel it and ban me.
Works for me! Once I had cleared cookies as suggested, the price showed up as USD$15.79 😀
How safe is this? I’ve got quite a large library on GOG, and I wouldn’t want to lose my account.
Dunno. I imagine it should be safe, you could always set up another account just for this transaction if you like.
£9.4 here, as i had both Witcher 1 and Witcher 2 registered. Feel somewhat bad for doing this to CD Projekt, but it’s been a full march launch-wise. Maybe having bought the CE for Witcher 2 will somehow aleviate my conscience :)) Cheers Lewie.
This is great on one level but it is CD Projekt who won’t be getting their share of the full retail price, a company that treats its customers very well, not sure if I am comfortable with this.
I broadly agree that they treat their customers well, but I consider charging people ~3x more simply because of where they are from is not treating customers well at all, and have no hesitation about circumventing this regional pricing discrimination.
Maybe because people in Ukraine earn 5-10 times less money than those in so-called Western world. Maybe CD Projekt lowers it so that even they can play this game. It is a discount for those who have less money, not a regular price. But you are free to convince CD Projekt not to have any discounts for poorer lands. They are poor so they should not play it.
Pretty broad generalisation you are making there. There are millionaires in Ukraine, and there are people living in poverty in the UK. Drawing economic lines in the sand along national borders is not rational in my opinion.
It is not a decision they have made out of generosity, it is financially driven. They are trying to maximise revenue by charging the highest price the market will bare in each country.
It’s obvious that they can’t charge everybody £11for a new AAA title. So your solution is to make it £50 in Ukraine, so that only a handful of “millionaires” would be able to afford it? Really?
You should feel ashamed, seriously.
The average wage in the Ukraine is €116, the UK €2723. I think that says it all.
There are many countries with lower wages that get charged the higher price.
You might not even need Hola for this. The GOG.com website sets a cookie on your computer that contains your country, currency and language preference, and then uses this cookie to determine which price to show. The cookie’s name is “gog_lc” and for me the default value was “EE_EUR_en” (Estonia, Euro, English). Changing the first two letters to “UA” is enough to have GOG show the Ukranian price (albeit in US dollars, as not all country+currency combinations seem to be supported). Other countries may have a cheaper price yet. See here for a full list of two-letter country codes you could try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Officially_assigned_code_elements
I didn’t actually try buying the game (as I might decide to buy it on Steam instead), so I can’t guarantee this will work, but it’s worth a shot. Look on Bing/Google for instructions on how to edit cookies in your browser of choice.
This announcement from last June contains a list of countries where, in addition to Ukraine, the pre-order price should be significantly cheaper than elsewhere:
http://www.gog.com/news/the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_price_update
Can confirm this worked for me.
Hey, In most cases I agree with the Regional Pricing problems, there are games that indeed are cheaper in certain countries when their price for our countries (let’s say Europe and US) is shamefully high. But there are more things to take into consideration.
GOG, has explained why some of their games have regional pricing:
http://www.gog.com/news/letter_from_the_md_about_regional_pricing
They are open about what they are doing and they are a company that cares about the community and tries to make everything as fair as possible despite of what the gaming industry forces them to do. They even got sued because they didn’t want to put the same price on a retail copy of The Witcher 2 and on a digital one.
So no, they probably will not check where you bought the game from, their premises is trust the community, they trust you for this as they trust you won’t upload the games you buy from them (that have no DRM) to torrent networks.
That said I feel it is terribly wrong to cheat a company like that, their games are fairly priced and if a discount in the price means that much then wait until the game gets a discount, at least for a company that always treated their clients and the community fairly.
Not an unreasonable position. Still, I posted this deal for much the same reason I would post any other: so people can decide for themselves whether they want to buy it or not, taking into account a wide variety of factors. If the developer’s prior actions lead you to opt out of this particular deal, then I’d consider that a great outcome for all involved parties, but it would be remiss of me to not inform people about this deal, since no doubt there are people who would opt into it.
Indeed, it is up to each person to go with their consciences, that is why I appealed to the consciences of the people ;D
I do agree that while regional pricing can be good, people in those countries wouldn’t be able to afford the full price. Distribution platforms tend to abuse it.
Similarly I also agree that in the case of GOG, the difference in price is too big and too tempting, I wonder why they chose such a low price.
Understood. I think it’s perfectly healthy for people to discuss the merits of any given deal here in the comments, even if I’ve usually taken into consideration the different sides of the debate prior to publishing, unless there happens to be an aspect of the deal I have missed. Cheers for your input!
I don’t feel I’m cheating them anyway, since I just wouldn’t buy it at its current price. I very rarely buy a game for more than £10, and since my current PC won’t even run it, I’m in no hurry. The difference between me exploiting this loophole and me waiting for some Steam sale, is that this way they get the money today instead of in two 2-3 years time.
I don’t think GOG’s regional pricing policy explains the massive difference in this particular case.
The way I understand it is, if they’re forced (by the developer/publisher/distributor/whoever) to price a digital game using the 1$ = 1€ rule, they will refund you the difference out of their own pocket as store credit or gift cards or whatever. This way the developer is happy and EU customers don’t get completely shafted.
However, this does not explain why TW3 is several times cheaper in certain countries like Ukraine, and they’re certainly not going to refund anyone that difference.
Another example is Age of Wonders 3. The Deluxe Edition costs €45 in the EU and $45 in the US. That difference gets refunded to EU customers. However, it costs only $20 in Ukraine (feel free to check with Hola or the method I described above). Ditto for Divinity: Original Sin. Will EU (or US, for that matter) customers be refunded the difference in those cases? I wish.
I agree with your point broadly, except for your use of the word “forced”. If there is any third party mandating this approach to pricing, it was CD Projekt’s decision to engage with them in such a way where they relinquished this control.
Thx, it’s $13.99 if you have the two previous Witcher games on your GOG account.
Guys, please, don’t use this trick (if you can afford the full price).
GOG.com and CD Projekt don’t deserve this. They introduced this lower price in Ukraine becuse almost nobody there can afford £50 for a game.
It’s literally half of the average monthly wage there (if you don’t believe me, just google it). So making the game cost £50 there would mean that almost nobody would be able to enjoy the game legitimately.
Please, don’t take advantage of this situation.
Shame on you, Lewie Procter.
I’m with Lewie on this one. He reports the deals. Whether we use it or not is *our* choice.
Personally, I’m not going to use the trick, but that’s my call.
You people just fail to understand the simple truth – regional prices are not set out of generosity, they are set to MAXIMIZE profits. It was said and explained so many times, so I won’t elaborate.
Consider this, for example: I live in Serbia, which is by any means one of the poorest European countries. Yet, prices on Steam, and elsewhere, are EXACTLY the same as in much of Europe. The Witcher 3 is €54.89 here on GOG. And, guess what, average salary here is in the range of about €250. So, is that fair? Should people say: “Hey, you know what, I’m just gonna shell out one week salary to play this!” Would you pay, let’s say, £500 for a game, if there is way to buy it cheaper? Or, is it justified for people in Serbia, to use VPN methods, to buy software at more reasonable prices? And, if it is, would it be justified for poorer people from UK, for example? If not, why not?
Truth is, there is no fairness in this. Everyone is out to get what is best for themselves. So, do what you think is best, but please refrain from this Holier than thou attitude.
half of eastern europe is in the west earning big wages and blocking up my bloody train!
Just an update: the game seems to have been removed from my gog account. So I guess they are on to this FYI.
Has anyone else noticed that Witcher 3 is missing from their GOG account?
So. Is this still working? Have the games been revoked from people’s accounts?
No dude game is still on my account. I was checking every day for the past two weeks and its still there. I have even got some free game recenlty as the account owned. N-I-C-E.