Good Old Games Interview
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You talk a lot about DRM, saying that the world would be more beautiful without it. If so, do you intend to use it for The Witcher 2? Or is the emphasis on no DRM just a marketing ploy?
From the very beginning of our work on GOG, the lack of DRM was a total priority for us. Had we not convinced the publishers that such a model is viable, there would be no GOG at all. Why is it so important? It results directly from the players' expectations (just read any gaming forums) and our experience with distributing classic titles in Eastern Europe. Of course there are various kinds of DRMs - some of them you can live with, because they're not as disruptive, but others you can't. When working on GOG, we decided to have no compromises. We treat our customers fairly and try not to make their lives harder, because the customer always has an alternative. They do not have to buy the game, it's enough for them to just download a torrent - of course, it won't always work with his system, it will lack add-ons or will turn out to be a virus. Our philosophy at GOG.com is convincing players that it's worth paying $5.99 or $9.99 for a game with lots of extra materials, full compatibility and support. We assume that if we respect our users, they will respect us, and so far it's been working quite well. Of course, there will always be a group of players that will choose to pirate the games, but if our offer is really fair, when we add lots of bonus materials, guarantee compatibility, etc., then we get a very positive feedback, sell more games and have more happy customers.
From our experience in the Eastern markets (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary), it is evident that offering the players good value for money is the formula for success. Of course, the game itself needs to be good, but excessive security measures and the price being too high in relation to quality guarantee failure. It is really surprising how major publishers can't draw the right conclusions from all the DRM failures and how immune they are to the voices of their customers. I was personally affected when I bought Modern Warfare 2. The installation (through Steam) took almost two days and only then I could sit down and play it. Then, when I uninstalled it from Steam, I tried to delete Steam itself. It turned out that there is no "Uninstall? option in the Steam directory, and when I tried to do it through Add/Remove, I faced a message that I have no Administrative privileges (sic!). Fortunately, I managed to uninstall it thanks to a clever program called Total Uninstall, which effectively deletes leftover files from badly written programs. After such experience, it's hard to be positively inclined towards DRM. One would want to buy a new game (for lots of money, by the way), install it and start playing normally, not be forced to do various different things and install various malware that cannot be normally removed. ;)
As for The Witcher 2 - it's a good question, but it's too early for a definitive answer. Yes, we would like to have The Witcher 2 without DRM, but the final decision will be made several months before the game is published, together with the worldwide publisher. We have many ideas on how to convince the players to buy the game legally (emphasis on convince, not force), but we need time to finalize them. By the way, I'd like to remind that the first Witcher had no DRM as such. Thanks to our stubbornness, we managed to ensure that TAGES only checks the authenticity of the disc in the drive, but does not connect with any server to authenticate the copy (which is the main issue with DRM).
