Good Old Games Interview
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What is the history of GOG? How does GOG differ from other game digital distribution services?
The concept to offer old games to gamers had long been germinating in the minds of CD Projekt's management. You have to know that GOG.com is part of the CD Projekt group of companies that also includes CD Projekt RED development studio, the creators of the acclaimed RPG The Witcher. CD Projekt started their business as retail distributor of games in Poland in mid-90's. One of company's biggest successes on the Polish gaming market, which was heavily pirated at that time, was introducing a budget series of classic PC games to Polish gamers.
With such experience in this segment on the Polish market, an idea about conquering the worldwide audience was just a matter of time. Sometime around 2007 they started to form a concept of digital distribution service that would offer classic PC games for cheap and optimized to run on modern operating systems. As 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.
The next couple of months were strictly dedicated to analyzing the digital distribution market, expanding the concept of the service and preparing the design and programming side of the project. At first the team was a small group of designers and web-developers, but it quickly grew into group of 20 people including more designers and developers :), business development people, a band of support/testers and some marketing folks. With two acclaimed publishers on board, Interplay and Codemasters, we were ready to announce the service in June 2008, launched a closed beta in September and finally opened the service for everyone in October. Since then we've finished the 2-year beta stage, signed more than 40 partners (publishers and developers) and released more than 300 classic games.
As for what differs GOG from other digital distribution platforms there are couple of things. First what you will notice is the offering - we only sell acclaimed classic titles like Baldur's Gate, Gabriel Knight series, The Longest Journey, Myst, Tex Murphy series and many more. Second very important thing is the lack of any DRM at all in our games. This means if you buy a game at GOG it's practically yours - you can install it on any computer you own, back it up on a CD or HDD, play it without the need of being connected to the internet. But that's not all, if you use other dd services you will notice that prices are different for different parts of the world. On GOG you have the same prices worldwide, no matter where you live, be it USA or Honduras, you'll always pay $5.99 USD for Broken Sword or $9.99 USD for Sanitarium. Sounds like the best digital distribution experience there can be? Well, feel free to visit GOG, create an account, download 4 free games and check for yourself if we're doing the job right.
