GOG.com Interview, Service Has Moved 17k Copies of Legend of Grimrock
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GOG, and CD Projekt, trade heavily on the perception that, against businessman like Activision's Bobby Kotick, they seem to be authentically nerdy gamers making their relatively small scale and willingness to go the extra mile a selling point. Sometimes this backfires the (new) GOG was trailed with an announcement that GOG was to be closed, with the fact that it would immediately be reopened witheld until the day of the announcement. Faced with customers irked that GOG, which was supposed to be their people, had indulged in a marketing stunt that seemed to show a Big Software disregard for their feelings, Rambourg and Iwinski doubled down on geeky, dressing as medieval monks to release a penitential apology. The (French monk) then appeared as an Easter egg in The Witcher 2.
Back to Rambourg:
Historically, GOG has worked mainly with many major publishers, and these healthy relationships are how we managed to, for example, sign some recent titles from Ubisoft such as Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut or Heroes of Might & Magic 5. And we have more to come! Also, we decided to work more closely with developers especially indie developers as a majority of them share our values and we believe GOG can help them make their games visible among media and gamers. In this respect, we released several independent titles so far, such as Trine, Machinarium, and The Whispered World.
We also want to release brand new PC titles, just like we did last year with The Witcher 2. A few weeks ago, we released our second-ever brand-new title. It was an old-school RPG called The Legend of Grimrock. This is a lovely title developed by a few passionate people and which is reminiscent of the good old days, when players were crawling for hours within virtual dungeons with nothing but a mouse and keyboard to save them.
[He's not kidding - The Legend of Grimrock is a love letter to Dungeon Master on the Atari ST.]
We have sold over 17,000 units of this title since we launched it at the end of March, which we are really happy with. This nice sales performance is showing in our humble opinion that GOG can be a valuable partner for any developer. And that's nowhere near all. We have many more great indie titles up our sleeves for the coming months.
I would note that while we're really motivated by these great new titles that are coming to GOG.com, we are still very committed to continuing to revive great classics as well. There are still some great gems from the past missing in our catalogue and we will do our very best to bring these to our faithful users. These are the most complicated titles to sign though, as the rights behind many of these games are usually scattered between numerous rights holders. But (impossible) is not GOG!
