Slashdot Mirror
DRM-Free Games Site GOG.com Gone
An anonymous reader writes "Just a day after adding a new game and a handful of promotions, GOG.com, a seller of classic games in a DRM-free format, has closed shop, leaving only a sparse placeholder page and a mention on Twitter that 'sometimes it's really hard being DRM-free... hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy.' The site mentions that games purchased in the past will become accessible for downloading within the week, but there is no word on how long this will continue to be possible."
The announcement on the site's front page says, in part, "This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await."
Publishers don't get it. I purchased more games from GoG in a year than I have in the last 10 through any other channel. Specifically BECAUSE they were DRM-free. ;-/
It's starting to look like the platform's shutdown is just a marketing stunt. Good Old Games spokesman Tom Ohle told us that "as the site says, this doesn't mean GOG is dead. We will have more to share in the next couple of days." A NeoGAF poster dug up a Polish business forum, in which CD Projekt co-founder Micha Kiciski purportedly mentions a conference dated for this Wednesday, adding, "we'll post information about this soon on GOG.com (please do not panic after reading the information contained there.)" We'll keep an eye out for more info.
Joystiq
in the age of internet and digital downloads, the middleman, publisher, is the problem. not needed anymore, yet they still introduce problems into the production to consumer sequence, right in the middle. actually, in some sectors, they totally control entire sequence.
they need to be removed.
Read radical news here
Or maybe Gog.com just hired a shitty accountant and he got behind on payroll. No sense jumping to conclusions before we know all the facts-- truth is, a ton of businesses fail for a ton of different reasons.
Comment of the year
There's no "stunt" to this. It says right in their notice that the site is ending in its "current form" and that it will eventually return. Which contrasts with Joystiq's sensationalist headline that GOG "shuts down" (also Slashdot's).
What CD Projekt actually said in the forum was that posting the notice on the current site (which IS closed and isn't just going to be reactivated) was part of a process to raise awareness of the new site that will take its place, which is pretty plain from the notice that they posted, had anyone bothered to actually read it.
Marketing yes, stunt no. This isn't Death (and Return) of Superman. They said right up front what was going to happen. Just because people glossed over the text and rushed to print a headline, well, that kind of makes the editors at Joystiq (and Slashdot) out to look like tools. Don't try to shift blame to CD Projekt for this.
Having purchased games from both GOG and Steam, I'd pick GOG over Steam any day. I'd argue that Steam made it more complicated, if only because they force you to install and use a client. And then it forces me to download the game again if I choose to uninstall it from my HD. GOG was a simple download and install, always. I never had to download the game again after uninstalling it, I could just burn it to DVD as is, or move it to another HD.
The main function a publisher provides for videogames is money. Games are expensive to develop. Game studios cannot always assume that financial risk. Remember that if you self develop you have to pay everyone's salaries, all the costs, while it is being developed. If it flops, you are SOL. So publishers are companies that put up the money. That is their primary function. You sell them a game idea they like, they put up the costs of developing it.
Along those lines, they function as the business side of things. A bunch of programmers might not make for the best business team. The most classic example is Duke Nukem Forever. 3DRealm had lots of money from the original Duke title so they could self publish, if they wanted to, and elected to do so. However that meant nobody was minding after them to release it. So they faffed about and delayed things and so on. Eventually it became a joke, a lot of wasted money, and ultimately their demise. In a situation with a separate publisher they could have said "No, the game is looking good as it is. You go in to crunch mode, and we ship in 9 months." Might not have been The Best Game Evar(tm) had that happened but it would have been a game, not a perpetually half-finished project.
Publishers also do marketing and distribution. If you think that is easy or unnecessary then that only exposes your ignorance of the situation. Stores are still where most sales happen (ask Stardock, they publish, develop, and sell online, they'll tell you stores still outsell online 3-4:1). Publishers make sure people know the game is coming out, negotiate with stores for shelf space and release dates, and so on.
In fact, because of the distribution, even some self funded shops use publishers. Valve funds their own development, but uses a publisher for physical distribution (Activision I think).
Also none of this is relevant to the older games being talked about. Even if you think they shouldn't have been paid for by a publisher, they were, meaning the publisher owns the rights and sets the rules.
Plus, they must suck at advertising. This is the first I heard of them.
But wait ... Slashbot CorrectThink tells us that 1.) advertising and marketing are bad! 2.) Musicians or writers or artists should just be successful by word of mouth and not need evil corporations to advertise, that's why their model is outdated! And 3.) game companies would just succeed if only they removed all DRM! But this was a DRM-free games company that did no advertising and marketed by word of mouth to geeks ... they should have been guaranteed to never go out of business!
PARADOX! PARADOX! NOMAD WILL NOW SELF-DESTRUCT!!!!
"95% of all Slashdot
But the cool thing is, this doesn't affect their customers' ability to play games in any way.
If Steam shut down, though...
I don't think they provided enough of a value-add above and beyond the (IMHO very good) value they offered on the games. For example, DRM-free was great, and the price was right, but they didn't really play up the fact that purchasing through them rather than torrenting provided a *legal* copy to the purchaser. It may seem a rather trivial thing, but these days in which everyone is presumed to be an illegal downloader and the 'rightsholder police' can threaten lawsuits on a whim, the ability to produce valid proof of ownership is powerful. "Why, no, I did not pirate that game - in fact, here is a copy of my proof of purchase certificate (digitally signed and verifiable as authentic by downloading GoG's public verification key). As you can see, your honor, I have the right to possess a copy of the game. The plaintiff has no case." I tried a few times on the forums to advocate that they provide some sort of distinct proof of purchase, whether a signed 'digital receipt' of some sort, or even a nicely formatted pdf document that provided proof of ownership, but nobody was interested.
Other areas they might have explored: tangible media (for an extra fee) and gifting (with on-demand shipping of hard copies ready for wrapping). The former would be great for those that want a disk for backup/security purposes, or nice graphics and a case. The latter would be useful for giving 'Cousin Bob who loved Psychonauts but can't play his copy on the new PC' a cool gift for christmas that you could wrap up and put under the tree. GoG did gift certificates or somesuch thing, as I recall, but that is just no substitute for something that can be unwrapped and admired. Maybe the answer is to partner with someone like Amazon who has the infrastructure to target a broad audience and could properly sell the DRM-free message, as well as produce and ship tangible media at reasonable cost for those that want to purchase gifts.
All in all, DRM-free at a low price alone wasn't enough.
They were profiting by selling games which rightfully belong to the public domain.
The geek's sense of entitlement can be wonderful to behold.
Syberia 2 is six years old.
Many games in the Gog.com catalog were less than ten years old, less than fifteen years old.
iD open sources aging game engines. It does not open source IP that remains commercially viable and makes their games and corporate identity unique.
Howdy cow.. you do not enter slashdot a lot uh?
GoodOldGames has been *the posterchild* of "good example" for gaming distribution each time a story of DRM-something apears in slashdot!
Maybe what happened is just that they were not profitable... because you know... people copied the games instead of buying them .. hmmm how could they avoid that ;-)
yeah yeah i know, mod down -1 sad reality and all that..
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
couldnt agree more. The slashdot crowd whine like children about DRM but when a DRM-free site appears, they ignroe it and all get their games from torrents anyway.
Typical fucking hypocrites. No wonder we have DRM and no wonder it is here to stay.
Like others have already said, this is most likely a marketing stunt for getting out of beta. Yes, they have been in beta for the last 2 years and like the message in the site says, "we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form". At no point do they really say that GoG is gone. They mention change and that you will be able to re-download the games you have bought. They also had a promo running and this "announcement" happened on Sunday, which would be highly unlikely if this was a real site closing situation. A real closing announcement wouldn't come suddenly out of the blue without any previous indications of internal or external problems that caused it, nor would they do it on Sunday when most of the workers (and boss staff) are not working.