I was wondering about this too, since quite a few posts talk about Daedalic being in financial trouble as if it was a fact. Are there any reliable sources for this information that someone could kindly point me to or is it all just speculation?

Hmm, I have the game on Steam and the free update, nice somehow, but.. French support dropped? :(

Their prices have gone up significantly — I passed on the excellent Blackguards because I found it to expensive. They are currently charging box prices for download versions.

Which German publisher wants online pricing = retail/boxed version pricing?

I'm mostly glad for the alternate ending.

Being given the illusion of choice (and the narrator literally saying you had to make a choice) and then being barred from from picking one of the two options annoyed me quite a bit when I finished playing it.

So, in other words, nothing whatsoever which can justify doubling the price of the game itself.

I was even thinking about buying the game recently. Well, that's certainly no longer something I have to worry about. They obviously don't want my money.

Oh yes, they want your money, the want just more of it...
I don't think so. Yes, they are always complaining how bad everything is, but they are also known for working with unpayed interns...

I think they are pretty good in business. They had their own Steam weekend sale, they are working on bigger and more complex games outside of "their" genre and ca afford to double the prices for their older games...

IF Daedalic would be in trouble, we would already have the missing german versions here and see all Deadalic titles regularly in sales or bundles to get every buck they can get - looks like this is not necessary...

Daedalic seems to be intent on getting their customers pissed off, and they're doing a very good job at it.

They can be sure they lost me as a customer, even if I'm not exactly a cash cow. I'll play the games I bought and only get something new if it's dirt cheap. That's a pity, because I had my eye on Night of the Rabbit.

Well if I ever finish my backlog (ha! keep dreaming) and I feel the desperate need to play ONE particular game from them I'll be hard pressed to get it at "unofficial sources" (read: pirate bay).

As for the free update it is a good thing we all get it, but as Ghorpm said it is just one less mistake on their track record. Certainly if they thought they could get away with selling a patch they wouldn't think twice.

"It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too-in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?"

Celebrate people. The game is now 20% off! That's doubleplusgood!

True. Can't really complain about the current deal -- either you want to pull the trigger on that deal or you don't. But one can still mock the way a major price increase is presented as a sale.

That'd be my guess. It's likely their current view is that their initial pricing underestimated the psychological effect of high %s off so they're trying a new approach. But neither they nor GOG are likely to come out and say that because then they'd be pretty much calling at least some subset of their future customers stupid idiots, easily fooled. (And it's hard to blame a business for not saying things that would just piss off potential customers as long as they're not engaged in outright fraud or something.)

I think you (and at least a dozen others in this thread) are looking at it the wrong way. Daedalic was probably planning on bumping the price up anyway (see above about psychology of sales). They just decided to throw in a little extra at the same time -- and if that means for example that some future sale is 60% off of 2X instead of 20% off of X (aka the same actual price) and you get this extra stuff tossed in, where's the harm? (Of course maybe I'm wrong and Daedalic is actually trying to reverse the trend where customers control the price by how long they wait to buy and Daedalic is like "Oh yeah? Take that! Didn't see that coming, did ya punk?" <- pretend I'm channeling tinyE here.)

More doublespeak in a game update/release? Say it ain't so!

Well, what did you expect? Daedalic's logic skills were already described a couple years ago in the top rated review for this game:

I could put up with his whinny depressing voice for the whole game if the puzzles didn't become so abstract and random.
I ended up following a walkthrough online and it got to the point where I had to use the walkthrough for EVERY puzzle!
I have more patience then most adventure gamers... I have played all the Monkey Island games, Myst games, etc.
Even those games have areas where you need to find a walkthrough and have some abstract puzzles that don't make sense, but Whispered World finally broke me!

I thought the deal there was that blackguards was not selling well at full price. Besides, read the above comments on psychology of sales -- maybe that was Daedalic's plan all along: Sell it at full price to a few "suckers" ("eager enthusiasts"), and after that vein dries up make their real bling selling it to a larger audience at a more reasonable price (aka a "sale").

I have to strongly disagree with your assessment of this move as "shitty". Who's getting "shit on" here? No one. Current customers get free stuff. Potential future customers still have 100% control over whether or not they think the offered price is acceptable to them, and the new higher base price is likely just so Daedalic can offer higher discounts. Granted people may be stupid, but if someone is happier getting the game with a higher % off (even if it's the same effective price), what's the harm in that? Stupid people have the right to pursue happiness just like the rest of us! (And smart people know to use the effective price to make their decisions, so again I ask, who is harmed here?)

How do you know that? It's their business, their risk, they pay the price if their decisions doesn't pay off. Plus, they may be playing the long game while your thinking is of a more (perhaps too) limited scope -- even if a higher price on this game results in less sales of this one game, Daedalic might be trying to send a message here that they believe their games hold value even after several years and they will price accordingly. That may actually increase the number of sales they get at higher prices (increasing their profits) because people who like their games will learn that waiting a year or two isn't going to save them a lot of money so they may as well buy now and go for the instant gratification of playing the game right away.

You might want to look into getting a book written by someone who actually knows what "cheat" means.

And with that cmdr_flashheart is awarded Most Entertaining Post of Thread. (And considering that the upgrade is free, your post is saying a lot!)

I've heard that GOG has been working on an optional client for some time. The ideal would probably be that this client can automatically check what's on your hard drive against (the latest version of) what's in your account and tell you for sure which of your downloads are up-to-date (and it could even tell you if a hard-drive problem on your end has caused any of your downloads to go corrupt over time). Since "the task is simple" though, does that mean you are offering to write said client for GOG? :-P

Wow. What a false dichotomy. And both options in that dichotomy are kind of silly. (One assumes Daedalic is really stupid {possible I guess, but not the most likely explanation}, and the other misrepresents an offer of voluntary exchange as "bad faith".)

Doublewow. Could we just ban asshats on GOG forums who suggest piracy? It's really not conducive to getting publishers to sell games DRM free. Read the whole thread in post order. Didn't think it would be so full of goofiness when I read your post, but you called it.

EDIT: Corrected attribution of last quote.

Wait, something is messed up with the quotes. I never said that. Personally I do not care much, imo people should not buy DRM AT ALL (to boycott crap is the only way to make companies listen) and I have my Whispered World copy already.

Too bad I just finished it a second time, so I won't play anytime soon.

Eh... is it a discussion about exact meaning of words? If so I surrender because as a non-native speaker I don't have a chance ;)

Of course everything what you've said is technically correct - no one was harmed here. But you know... there is something more then "technically correct". First of all they did hurt their own image. Splitting Edna & Harvey games and in practice significantly increasing their prices, giving some questionable new content so it may seem that doubling the price of relatively old game is justifiable - technically it doesn't hurt anyone because, as you said, we still have a full control whether we want to buy their products or not. But it does leave a very bad impression. For years they were neglecting their game, instead of fixing it they were providing save game files so that you could skip problematic moments. And now they double the price and give some questionable new content. If that's not a shitty move, well, what is?

Steam´s special edition version has separated audio stories and a comic (thing wich I would love to have here)

Curious that the new 'special edition' didn't ever pop up as either new or as an update in my game list, rather I am having to seek it out manually to download the updated version. Mostly curious and not a high priority.

The thing is, they never provided a patch, its a brand new install either way. And it isn't compatible with old saved games.

And Daedalic saw the light and added SE to the original TWW owners on Steam as well.

The fact that they are working on an optional client is a guess. However I agree with you, that would be ideal and I hope will go there at some point.
But right now, the process of marking file as updated is done manually. But randomly. It should be done in a more consistent way otherwise is useless: who will benefit from something you can't rely on if you still have to check every news and every thread of the forum to find out if something is changed? That's what I'm saying: they choose to display updated games on your account and they are doing it manually, so the task is simple (but boring and prone to error) and should be done in a better way otherwise is useless.
I cannot write a client for GOG, bud I'll gladly check a flag to set their files as updated if they can provide me the info and the means to do so. Or they can simply do that every time they upload a new file manually until a client will be available.