Good Old Games

Just some quick clarification: GOG.com and CD Projekt RED (The Witcher developers) are two separate divisions of CD Projekt; so the two companies work independently and I just so happen to be in a unique position in that I work for and can comment on both!

We already showed a bit of where we'd like to go with full-scale PC products with The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. Yes it still had copy protection, but it was about as limited as possible. Of course, even with that limited protection, the game has been pirated, showing again that you just can't stop those jerks. But we went in and packed the retail version full of bonus materials, making it akin to a Collector's Edition at a standard-game price. We tossed in two music CDs, a making-of DVD, a couple of short adventures, a map, etc., to encourage people to actually cough up their hard-earned money for a physical product, and I think that's the key to maintaining (or perhaps re-establishing) a strong market for PC games at retail.

On the PC you don't have to worry about things like paying licensing fees back to the console manufacturer, so you theoretically have a lot more room to play around with box contents. In an ideal world, we'd want a new Witcher game to have no copy protection whatsoever - I'm being serious there - and we'd just incentivise the purchase of the retail product, as well as making sure that the game is easily available for purchase digitally. Of course there are business realities that for one reason or another might not make that possible, but we're rather passionate about this subject.

Hell, we'd even want to make sure that the digitally available game has the same bonus content (as we did with the Enhanced Edition) to encourage people to pay for it. It's just a matter of treating your customers with respect, rather than putting in copy protection that doesn't prevent piracy anyway - all you're doing is increasing the possibility that someone might run into issues with the protection software... and maybe you're even issuing a challenge to potential pirates: "We've got something that will make it harder for you to distribute our game illegally. What are you going to do about it?"

I don't think we'd totally rule it out, but it would be a really complex venture. There would be totally new contracts, we'd have to go back to the DRM-free debate, we'd need to establish a retail distribution channel, etc. For now we're doing what we can to make these digital downloads as close as we can to the real thing - we have PDF manuals, the virtual game shelf to store your collection, strategy guides for some titles... It's obviously not the same as owning the package, but we're not preventing people from burning the game to a disc anyway. You could feasibly recreate your own little retro game collection. For now we're focused on the digital realm, though.

There's always been a desire in this industry to push the limits of graphics technology, and that urge is so much more prevalent today. In today's games, if you don't have the latest and greatest visuals, you're fighting a very hard uphill battle. People will look at your game and cry out, "what a piece of s*** - it doesn't even have bloom!" or "F*** this, it has too much bloom!" And that's really just because of that uncanny valley - as graphics get more realistic, you notice the imperfections more. So now developers need massive art teams to meet those excessively high demands, and games are getting shorter and have to be less creative - very few companies are willing to take a risk on a multi-million-dollar project.

The classic games we want people to experience, on the other hand, come from a time when developers didn't have to worry about cutting-edge graphics to the level they do today. They were able to focus on providing a great gameplay experience; the graphics were just there to support that experience.

Some people want to relive games of their youth. Others may want to see why a game like Fallout 3 was so hyped up - they may have missed the original games, and GOG gives them the opportunity to find out what all the fuss is about. In some cases people have to rely on retro games because a genre has fallen out of favour... point-and-click adventures or flight sims, for example.

There are really a lot of reasons to play retro games... if you don't need your games to use Unreal 3 tech or whatever, then USD 5.99 or USD 9.99 are damn good price points for countless hours of gaming.

Right now we're working on another big update to the service. "Update 1" brought a virtual shelf to stack your GOG.com games on and it improved the forums. I can't say what's going to be in the second update, not to spoil the whole surprise, but it will add a lot of improvements to the community section! Can't really wait when it'll be launched. Aside of that we'll announce a number of deals that will expand the ever-growing catalogue of Good Old Games and make our users happy. After announcing Ubisoft, I'm sure publishers will stand in line to sell their back catalogue games on GOG.com [smiles].