An Interview with Good Old Games

With a name like Good old Games, chances are you haven't heard of GOG.com unless you're an old school gamer. These guys may digitally distribute old titles but they do so DRM free because like us, they're a bunch of gamers who just want to play games. We sit down for a rather long chat with Lukasz Kukawski, Marketing Manger at GOG.com who takes us through this website's history, its goals and future plans.

The website

So how was GOG born? What's your USP?

The concept of offering 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 RED group of companies that also includes CD Projekt RED development studio, the creators of the acclaimed RPG franchise The Witcher. CD Projekt started their business as retail distributor of games in Poland in mid-90's. One of the 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. 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 Team

So 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 a 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. We 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 350 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, the Gabriel Knight series, Wing Commander, Duke Nukem 3D, Fallout, Dungeon Keeper, and many many more. The second very important thing is the lack of any copy protection (also known as DRM) at all in our games. This means if you buy a game at GOG it's yours. We don’t try to control what you do with your game. You can install it on any computer you own, back it up on a CD or HDD, play it without an Internet connection—it’s game ownership like it used to be in the old days. But that's not all, if you use other digital distribution 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 India or Finland, you'll always pay $5.99 USD for Alpha Centauri or $9.99 USD for The Witcher. Sounds like the best digital distribution experience there can be? We like to think so! If you want to see if you agree with us, feel free to visit GOG, create an account, download 6 free games and check for yourself if we're doing it right.