Good Old Games Interview
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How hard is it to convince publishers to sell their games on GOG.com?
Guillaume: Well, it is all about keeping on building up your credibility in the end. Back in 2007 - one year before the official launch of GOG - it was really tough to convince rights owners to go the DRM-free way.
There were concerns about piracy mostly, which was quite paradoxical when one bears in mind that those old PC classics had unfortunately already been pirated heavily. Put a DRM on a title that was initially released without any and all you will achieve is triggering the users' wrath i.e. encouraging them to... pirate those games even more! Therefore, we took the time to meet some key players of the industry and explain them that the best way to revive back-catalogue content was 1. to make the whole experience hassle-free for the end user (no DRM, full Windows compatibility, 2 SRPs for the whole planet, unlimited re-downloads) and 2. put much heart and efforts into the products themselves, by preparing exclusive free goodies (wallpapers, soundtracks, manuals and many other!) for our users, as well as doing some interviews with some legendary folks from the golden PC era.
Basically, cultivating ease of use, passion and nostalgia is the most appropriate method to give a well-deserved second youth to PC classics. We eventually managed to convince Interplay to take part in the GOG adventure... and then many others followed (40+ publishers and developers gave us their children... I mean... their beloved games so far :)
Every new key partner announced on GOG is basically one more step towards convincing the few remaining skeptical ones. The massive licensing deal we signed recently with Atari-Hasbro for some major D&D RPG games (Baldur's Gate anyone? :) allowed us to go back to some key publishers with some heavy arguments on the plate and we are working hard to sign some major titles in 2011. Rights owners need to be shown that our model is working fine, not causing any harm and most important, that it can help them monetize some products that got forgotten in their attics while millions of people have been expecting their comeback for ages. Being only 2 years old, I think GOG quite achieved that so far.
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How do you try to beat piracy when there is no DRM?
Guillaume: As I mentioned earlier in this interview, the best way to beat piracy is to believe in your model full-heartedly and go beyond the typical fears from our modern mainstream society :) Let me go against our values for a while for the sake of providing readers with a clear example (disclaimer: the below description is the exact opposite of what we are doing at GOG :)
Let's assume (for a while only please, yikes!) that all the products on GOG have a DRM in place, need an Internet connection to be played, have different prices across territories (9.99 EUR vs 9.99 USD anyone? :), are not remastered for any windows operating system (you just get the data files and there you go) and have no free goodies bundled with them (it is too time and resources-consuming for us at GOG you know... Business is about selling only in the end, so no room for free stuff!). Do you want to buy my products or are you likely to consider some illegal routes to satisfy your nostalgic gaming appetite? I think we all know the answer to be honest :)
The titles we have on GOG have already suffered a lot (when they got initially released) from piracy, so the best way to stop this process is to deliver a passionate, genuine and hassle-free experience to the users. I often think that GOG is some kind of fair trade business, whereby we took commitments towards the industry by instigating a valuable rewarding model for the users, who in exchange thank us by sticking to those values as they fully realize this is the one and only condition to make the experience sustainable.
When our partners ask whether we believe our fair model can really prevent games from being pirated, I always share the same fact with them: many abandonware websites took down the products we started distributing on GOG.com and decided to become our affiliates instead. I think this example perfectly embodies what we've managed to achieve so far: GOG will not change the world, but we can change mentalities at least.
