Online game distribution platform GOG has long prided itself on offering its entire catalogue DRM-free and with a single price for all games regardless of where in the world you're connecting from. Unfortunately it looks like they've had to compromise on the latter benefit in order to convince a large publisher to release some upcoming games on its service while keeping it free of copy protection.

A statement published on the GOG news blog stopped short of naming the upcoming games, only to say that they were "3 big titles", "two RPGs and a strategy game", that they "think will be hits with all of our gamers" (thanks VG247).

If you've been a member of the site for a long time, you may recall that when we launched sales of The Witcher 2 on GOG.com, we had to add in regional pricing. The game cost different amounts in in the US, the UK, the European Union, and Australia. We're doing something like that once again in order to bring you new titles from fantastic bigger studios. Since we don't accept currencies other than USD on GOG.com right now, we'll be charging the equivalent of the local price in USD for these titles. We wish that we could offer these games at flat prices everywhere in the world, but the decision on pricing is always in our partners' hands, and regional pricing is becoming the standard around the globe. We're doing this because we believe that there's no better way to accomplish our overall goals for DRM-Free gaming and GOG.com. We need more games, devs, and publishers on board to make DRM-Free gaming something that's standard for all of the gaming world!

Publisher Ubisoft has previously made several titles available on GOG, including Assassin's Creed, Heroes and Might and Magic and the original Assassin's Creed, but those were all at least serveral years old when they made their way onto the DRM-free service. Regionalised pricing notwithstanding, a major publisher launching a new release game DRM-free is still a reasonably big deal.