Good Old Games Interview
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Walk us through the negotiation process when GOG reaches out to a new publisher.
That's a long, time and work consuming process which might get sometimes pretty boring. At the very beginning of GOG, our business development guy did research on which games are the most wanted by potential and already existing GOG users (that data was pretty easy to get as every second or third email we got was a game request and it still remains that way :) ). After he had the very long list of good, old games ready he had to figure out who owns the rights to those games. And as you probably know this can be tricky as lots of publishers and developers have bankrupted, been bought by other companies, sold rights to their games to other companies, etc., so it's really a hell of a job to find the right people to talk to about those old games.
Contacting the owners of the games starts another stage in acquiring titles which includes presenting the offer, negotiating the conditions and agreeing on legal terms. And 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. 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 ;) .
When everyone agrees on everything that is in the agreement the fun part begins the whole team gets the list of games that were signed and we get all excited and reminiscent about the old days when we played those titles. 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. We, the PR team, work on a plan to create some buzz around those games without pissing off our community by another site closedown. And that's what the process looks like, in short. So the release of a game which is seen by our users is the last stage of a very long and laborious process.
