GoG Proves That There's a Market For Old Games
|
Speaking to Edge Magazine, GOG managing director Guillaume Rambourg discussed Good Old Games’ success, Publisher apprehension, and Witcher 2 sales. “Well, this has been a very, very long journey – when we started in 2008, we were talking to publishers everyone was looking at us with big, scary eyes. ‘Are those guys crazy? No-one gives a damn about those old games, they are dusty, they can’t generate profit. We don’t have time for this, we don’t have resources, we don’t want to dedicate teams internally.’ But somehow, this helped us, because we told them: ‘Fair enough. Great. We don’t want to use your time. We don’t want to use your resources. We will handle the whole process for you, we will be an all-in-one solution.’ We made them realise that from finding the original game masters, to remastering them, testing them, bundling them with goodies, giving technical support – we’d do everything.” “When we sign content for GOG, we contact abandonware websites and make them our affiliates. So they remove the illegal content, and instead they put a GOG banner and they direct sales and traffic to us. Step by step, we are cleaning up the market and we are making the back catalogue segment a visible, and viable, market for the industry.” Rambourg also stated that at the London Game Conference, he will be talking about sales numbers for Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Witcher 2 was developed by CD Projekt Red, GoG’s sister company, and distributed on GoG as a “test” to see how well a AAA game can sell with no DRM. According to Rambourg, the results were pretty surprising, in a good way. “I will be sharing the sales numbers on GOG compared to the competition. I think the numbers will speak for themselves, what DRM-free sales of even a triple-A title can achieve. Our values are universal and they don’t only apply to older content. They apply to triple-A, day-one releases.” I for one love what GoG is and has been doing, and am very happy that they’ve found success in re-releasing old games DRM free, packed with goodies, and for cheap. Because of them, many classics that have been long-since off the market and/or forgotten have found new life, success, and fans. And hopefully when the numbers for Witcher 2 are revealed, more publishers will see that DRM is not the way to go, and gradually begin to drop it. And hopefully more publishers will sign on with GoG. I’m still holding out hope that ONI will somehow find its way onto GoG. Via – Edge Magazine |
