GOG Celebrates 10 Years Of Competing With Piracy And Being DRM Free By Saying So

from the doing-it-right dept

In gamer circles, Good Old Games, or GOG, is everybody's favorite go-to retort whenever someone brings up the necessity for DRM. While the platform has always been something of a kid brother to Valve's Steam, GOG has made a name for itself by refusing to allow DRM on any titles it sells and, more importantly, being hyper-engaged with its customers and community and fostering that relationship by being genuinely open and human. What many people might not know, however, is that GOG first started in Europe, trying to figure out how to compete with piracy and the grey market long before it waged its war on DRM.

Well, GOG is taking a moment to remind everyone of that fact while celebrating its 10 year anniversary.

The GOG.COM story began in Poland, 1994 – a time and place where bootlegging reigned supreme and legal games were a luxury that few could afford. These were the early days of CD PROJEKT – back then specializing in local retail distribution, but the job wasn't easy. After all, how do you compete with the grey market?

Our answer was to offer value that gamers were already used to and then some: beloved games in big beautiful boxes packed with goodies, professional localization, and prices that are simply reasonable. And it worked!

It did indeed. In fact, the story of GOG's anniversary is the story of one platform successfully competing with free, with a much bigger competitor, and having to drag wary publishers that might be scared off of the anti-DRM stance along for the ride... for ten years. For a decade now, GOG has built a business that started and is still largely centered around retro-games that are easily pirated in the video game industry of all places, where customers are far more likely to know the methods for piracy than in other industries. And, yet, here they are, retelling how it filled the market for retro-games by assuming many people actually still wanted developers to be rewarded for great game-making.

Good Old Games launches in open beta as a legal way to support classics at affordable prices. No longer abandoned, all games would come with tech support and sorcery to get them running on modern PCs. Every game stuffed with goodies and bonus content that tickles our inner collectors. Everything would be DRM-free – it's only fair after all, and it captures that feeling of ownership on your digital shelf.

And it was both that catering to the public demand for valid and working versions of these games, and of course the stripping out of frustrating DRM, that built up GOG's loyal following. It was merely a few years later when GOG was the platform for several major title day 1 releases, all of which had to follow the anti-DRM "ideology", as GOG puts it. That there is an honest to God DRM-free option is the full response to any publisher that insists DRM is must-have.

Filed Under: copyright, drm, drm free, good old games, piracy, video games
Companies: gog, good old games

CD Projekt Shakes Down Suspected File Sharers

from the good-guys-dumb-move dept

Earlier in the month, we shared a bit about CD Projekt and how, despite its game, The Witcher 2, being pirated more than 4.5 million times (its back of the envelope calculation), it still stands by its decision to never put DRM on its games. CD Projekt is one of those few rare major developers that understand PC gamers and what they want in gaming. With this philosophy in mind, it really boggled my mind when I learned of what it has done next. CD Projekt is following in the footsteps of Righthaven and other copyright trolls and is suing individual file sharers.

I really can't figure out what is running through the minds of those in charge. These are the guys who have built up tremendous goodwill with PC gamers through Good Old Games and games like The Witcher. It knows that if it provides quality games that work and don't harm legitimate customers, people will pay. So why would they go through the trouble of suing file sharers? We all know how that is working out for other copyright trolls. CD Projekt only seems to be targeting European file sharers, where these kinds of shakedown attempts have flopped even worse than in the US. Either way, you would think that CD Projekt would at least learn from the mistakes of others pulling the same stunt.

Not only is this move baffling for such a company, it still has the same flaws that other mass infringement lawsuits hold, that of sending shake down letters to innocent parties. The letters are being sent based on information gleaned from an IP address. This is an extremely flawed method of identifying an infringer as IP addresses can be spoofed, network connections can be "borrowed" and even innocent people's computers can be hijacked by bot networks. With all these flaws in the method and the danger of losing goodwill with and respect from gamers, what is there to be gained? I guess when there is money on the table, even the most gamer-friendly developers can succumb to temptation.

Filed Under: copyright, good old games, shakedowns, witcher 2
Companies: cd projekt

Despite Publisher Apprehension, Good Old Games Proves A Market For Old DRM-Free Games Exists

from the build-it-and-they-will-come dept

In preparation for the London Game Conference, Edge Magazine spoke with Guillaume Rambourg about the path Good Old Games has taken on DRM and what other game companies can learn from it. While Rambourg was light on the details of just what he will be speaking on at the conference, he remains confident that other publishers can learn from GOG's experiment with The Witcher 2.

I will be sharing the sales numbers on GOG compared to the competition. I think the numbers will speak for themselves, what DRM-free sales of even a triple-A title can achieve. Our values are universal and they don't only apply to older content. They apply to triple-A, day-one releases.

I certainly look forward to learning more about what this experience has to show other developers but I am glad he still leaves plenty to glean from this interview. He continues by explaining that publishers have always had the ability to do exactly what GOG is doing, but they refused to do it, citing unreasonable expenses for low returns. In the early days of GOG, they were met with animosity from publishers over the idea of releasing older games. These publishers didn't want to dedicate time and resources to preparing these games to run on modern computers. They figured it was a losing strategy.

This is something that I have observed over the years. Very few PC game companies have released older games for any price. This led to the creation of a number of abandonware and warez websites. These sites have made available a good number of unauthorized games to the public. GOG specifically took notice of this and has actually used those sites to its advantage.

When we sign content for GOG, we contact abandonware websites and make them our affiliates. So they remove the illegal content, and instead they put a GOG banner and they direct sales and traffic to us. Step by step, we are cleaning up the market and we are making the back catalogue segment a visible, and viable, market for the industry.

This is a winning strategy. I have been to a number of these sites in the past and have observed that most of the well respected sites have policies in place to remove games that are available through legal channels and even link to that legal content when it is available. Not only does this build confidence in the abandonware site, it also builds a positive attitude toward the publisher that makes these games available.

The idea of releasing older games is a proposition that only recently took hold with most publishers. A lot of it had to do with GOG and Nintendo's Virtual Console. Prior to these two platforms, most of the work done in bringing older games to modern machines was done by the fan community through the use of emulators and cracks. Most of those efforts were either ignored or attacked by the industry. Now that the experiment has been proven a success in most avenues, I would hope that game publishers will see value in bringing their older games back. The gamers want it. The publishers just need to provide it. Not only will this move provide more legal content for the fans of the games, it will also bring in more revenue that did not exist before.

Filed Under: drm, good old games, pricing
Companies: good old games