Everything Good Old is New Again
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The whole thing started with the guys at Polish distributor CD Projekt, who got their start distributing games in the mid-90s. One of their early successes was releasing budget PC titles in the Polish market. Combining this experience with a personal love for classic PC games, they founded GOG as a subsidiary. "The idea came from [CD Projekt's] urge to play some classic PC games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Duke Nukem," explains GOG's PR and Marketing Manager, Lukasz Kukawski. "But when they started to search for those games they came to a realization that many games aren't available anywhere to buy legally, and even if you own them you'd have lots of issues running them on modern computers. So they were like 'Hey, let's use our business contacts and create a digital distribution platform with those classic games.'"
It's one thing to collect a handful of personal favorites and get them running, but putting together an entire digital distribution system? This was more than just a weekend project. "The next couple of months were strictly dedicated to analyzing the digital distribution market, building a list of the most requested titles by gamers, expanding the concept of the service and preparing the design and programming side of the project," says Kukawski. From there, things grew rapidly. "At first the team was a small group of designers and web-developers, but it quickly grew into a group of 20 people including more designers and developers, business development people, a band of support/testers and some marketing folks."
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Tracking down the rights to a game is just the first step in the acquisition process. The next step is convincing the owners to let GOG sell the games. "If we finally manage to figure out who owns what IPs we're contacting the owners of the games and another stage starts in the process. We have to present the offer, negotiate the conditions and agreeing on legal terms," explains Kukawski. This sometimes turns out to be a bit of a problem, even for games that haven't been on the market in decades. "With our approach to DRM this can be hard as hell, as in many cases we have to convince the rights owners that selling their products without any kind of copy protection is actually a good idea and it doesn't mean the games will get pirated. We need to convince them that the games that are laying in their archives and getting dusty can be monetized and bring a lot of good PR. Reviving the brands that were once very popular can even help with new games, so it's a win-win situation for everyone." The only thing left is to agree on price, but even that presents its own challenges. "This stage also includes negotiating prices of games, shares of revenue, etc. When everything is clear, the agreement goes to the legal department, where it can get stuck for weeks. In many cases that's the most time consuming stage in the whole process, and it's for sure the most boring one."
With the paperwork out of the way, the technical wizardry starts. In some ways, GOG is like a development studio, just working with pre-existing code and art assets. "Programmers get their hands on masters to optimize them to run on Win XP/Vista/7, testers check the builds, the product team starts working on game pages, additional materials, etc., while the design team prepares all the graphics. When games get finally released we only hope that our users are as happy and excited as we were while working on them."
