Good Old Games

While most of the digital distribution plaudits routinely go to Valve's Steam platform, with its unrivalled catalogue of modern games from a raft of supposedly competitive publishers, retro-minded PC gamers could do worse than switch their attention to GOG.com every now and then. Run by the same mother-company that houses The Witcher studio CD Projekt RED, GOG.com reworks old and relatively recent PC games like Duke Nukem 3D, TOCA Race Driver 3, MDK and Fallout 1 and 2 so they work on Windows XP and Vista, and distributes them DRM-free for cheapo prices.

The service has been quietly going about its business for a while, and has built up a catalogue that includes games from the likes of Codemasters, Epic, Oddworld Inhabitants, Revolution Software and Strategy First. As of this week, that list grows with the addition of Ubisoft, several of whose best games are now available for ten dollars. It seemed like a good excuse to catch up with marketing men Lukasz Kukawski and Tom Ohle and find out how it all works.

Eurogamer: For the benefit of EG Retro readers who might not be familiar with GOG.com, what's it all about?

Lukasz Kukawski: First of all let's reveal what GOG means - it is an acronym for Good Old Games. GOG.com is a digital distribution platform that supplies all old-school games fans with DRM-free and dirt-cheap PC classics. What's even better is that you don't have to worry that your computer won't run those games, because our programmers optimise all GOG.com titles to run smoothly on both Windows Vista and XP operation systems. The games catalogue offers almost 100 titles including such hits from the past century like Fallout, Duke Nukem 3D, Simon the Sorcerer, Unreal, Earthworm Jim, Freespace and more.

But GOG.com isn't just a digital outlet. The community section offers separate forums dedicated to games available on GOG.com where users can discuss their favourite titles and meet other gamers that share the same passion to classic games. To entertain our classy community we're also publishing retrospective articles by known writers about the development process of the games and we're running lots of contests where you can grab free games from the catalogue. Ultimately we want GOG.com to become the best place on the Internet for the fans of classic games.

Eurogamer: So basically you're directly competing with EG Retro. Duly noted. Your big news this week is that Ubisoft games are coming to GOG.com. Is this a one-off deal for a few games, or a longer-term thing, and can you tell us which games will be appearing and when?

Ah, happy days.

Tom Ohle: At least for now it's a one-off deal, but it'll bring a lot of great games to GOG.com. As of this week we already have some games I'd call "mega uber awesome" like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, IL-2 Sturmovik and one of my personal favourites, Beyond Good & Evil. There are even more games coming in the next few weeks, though, including Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Far Cry.

Eurogamer: Ubisoft is a pretty high-profile capture. How do these deals come about? Do you approach everyone and see who bites, do you target specific games, or do you contact publishers and developers with rich back catalogues?

Tom Ohle: There's no specific rule for that. Our biz-dev guys are really busy talking with different publishers, developers and rights-owners of the old games. Before we even launched the service, we prepared a long list of titles that are considered either as classics or as cult games that should be available on a service like ours. Now we only have to get those titles up on GOG.com!

The biz-dev team is targeting specific titles and then is searching for their rights-owners, which sometimes is the most difficult and time-consuming part of their work. When they finally get to the right people they approach them and make an offer for specific titles we'd like to sell on GOG.com. And sometimes the companies themselves are coming forward to ask if it's possible to sell their back catalogue games on GOG.com. Generally it's a long process but it really makes us happy when the deal finally gets finalised and we can announce it to the world.

Eurogamer: In Ubisoft's case, I'm personally excited about playing Beyond Good & Evil and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time again. How much are you going to charge for the games you mentioned?

Lukasz Kukawski: The games from Ubisoft's catalogue are all priced at USD 9.99.

Eurogamer: Retro gaming used to be the sole preserve of people with computers and the patience to trawl through Geocities websites with frames from 1998 downloading zip files and emulators, but these days there are countless ways to enjoy retro games on other formats. Do you see yourselves expanding GOG.com to platforms like Mac, iPhone, or even home and portable consoles from the Big Three?

"We do have a lot of Mac users asking for support, and certainly it's something we'd like to do in the future." Oh well, maybe one day, eh Steve?

Tom Ohle: I think that right now we're really focused on making GOG.com the ultimate destination for classic PC games. There's still such a rich history of games that we've barely started to explore. We do have a lot of Mac users asking for support, and certainly it's something we'd like to do in the future. It just adds an extra layer of complexity, in that if a game wasn't originally programmed to work on Mac, then there's not much we can do to implement that support.

For now we'll do everything we can to amass a PC-gaming catalogue of ridiculously large proportions, and then we'll see where we want to go from there.

Eurogamer: One of the best things about GOG.com is that you don't use any DRM, which is of course evil, and they're all going to hell. Does that make it more difficult to attract people to work with you? Have you ever had to turn anyone down?

Tom Ohle: Yeah, the DRM debate can be a bit of a sticking point in negotiations. A lot of companies still see some sort of copy protection as absolutely necessary to protect their IP. I fully understand that, but it's not like it actually works; I can go to [insert torrent site] and find any game I want right now.

It's definitely a hurdle for some companies that they're not ready to climb over yet, but we're confident they'll come around. There's a lot to be said for the fact that iTunes is now offering DRM-free songs, and you have a number of people within this industry - like Gabe Newell at Valve - noting that DRM may not be the best way to protect your IP. Our customers appreciate the fact that they can download their game anytime, install it on multiple PCs, back it up on a disc, etc. We just make sure we give them an incentive to buy the games legitimately rather than pirate them: namely, low prices and bonus materials.

If we added DRM I'm sure we'd have an easier job of bringing on new publishers. But, well, we like a challenge, and we're going to stick to our ideals. I really think the industry is moving away from restrictive DRM schemes; it's just a matter of time.

Eurogamer: Eurogamer abhors piracy, but I do believe that DRM is self-defeating. It galvanises huge swathes of your most loyal customers against you. Obviously you're in a unique position because you are re-publishing games that have been on the market for years, so it's not the same; there isn't the launch-day rush to piracy. But what do you think publishers putting brand new stuff out should do instead of DRM? What would you do on a new Witcher, for example? You must have thought about it.

Tom Ohle: Just some quick clarification: GOG.com and CD Projekt RED (The Witcher developers) are two separate divisions of CD Projekt; so the two companies work independently and I just so happen to be in a unique position in that I work for and can comment on both!

We already showed a bit of where we'd like to go with full-scale PC products with The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. Yes it still had copy protection, but it was about as limited as possible. Of course, even with that limited protection, the game has been pirated, showing again that you just can't stop those jerks. But we went in and packed the retail version full of bonus materials, making it akin to a Collector's Edition at a standard-game price. We tossed in two music CDs, a making-of DVD, a couple of short adventures, a map, etc., to encourage people to actually cough up their hard-earned money for a physical product, and I think that's the key to maintaining (or perhaps re-establishing) a strong market for PC games at retail.

On the PC you don't have to worry about things like paying licensing fees back to the console manufacturer, so you theoretically have a lot more room to play around with box contents. In an ideal world, we'd want a new Witcher game to have no copy protection whatsoever - I'm being serious there - and we'd just incentivise the purchase of the retail product, as well as making sure that the game is easily available for purchase digitally. Of course there are business realities that for one reason or another might not make that possible, but we're rather passionate about this subject.

Hell, we'd even want to make sure that the digitally available game has the same bonus content (as we did with the Enhanced Edition) to encourage people to pay for it. It's just a matter of treating your customers with respect, rather than putting in copy protection that doesn't prevent piracy anyway - all you're doing is increasing the possibility that someone might run into issues with the protection software... and maybe you're even issuing a challenge to potential pirates: "We've got something that will make it harder for you to distribute our game illegally. What are you going to do about it?"

Eurogamer: It's interesting that you mention the boxed side of things. Talking to a friend about GOG.com recently, he pointed out that while he likes the idea of having all these games, the nostalgia factor compels him to look at games on eBay instead, because you get the box, the manual, and all the rest. It reminds me of when GT Interactive re-released a lot of the old id games in proper boxes - Ultimate Doom, Doom II, etc. - with branded sleeves around original reprints. Would you consider expanding in that direction if GOG.com does really well?

"It's just a matter of treating your customers with respect, rather than putting in copy protection that doesn't prevent piracy anyway." You tell 'em, Geralt.

Tom Ohle: I don't think we'd totally rule it out, but it would be a really complex venture. There would be totally new contracts, we'd have to go back to the DRM-free debate, we'd need to establish a retail distribution channel, etc. For now we're doing what we can to make these digital downloads as close as we can to the real thing - we have PDF manuals, the virtual game shelf to store your collection, strategy guides for some titles... It's obviously not the same as owning the package, but we're not preventing people from burning the game to a disc anyway. You could feasibly recreate your own little retro game collection. For now we're focused on the digital realm, though.

Eurogamer: Finally, why play retro PC games at all? What do they have that modern games don't?

Tom Ohle: There's always been a desire in this industry to push the limits of graphics technology, and that urge is so much more prevalent today. In today's games, if you don't have the latest and greatest visuals, you're fighting a very hard uphill battle. People will look at your game and cry out, "what a piece of s*** - it doesn't even have bloom!" or "F*** this, it has too much bloom!" And that's really just because of that uncanny valley - as graphics get more realistic, you notice the imperfections more. So now developers need massive art teams to meet those excessively high demands, and games are getting shorter and have to be less creative - very few companies are willing to take a risk on a multi-million-dollar project.

The classic games we want people to experience, on the other hand, come from a time when developers didn't have to worry about cutting-edge graphics to the level they do today. They were able to focus on providing a great gameplay experience; the graphics were just there to support that experience.

Some people want to relive games of their youth. Others may want to see why a game like Fallout 3 was so hyped up - they may have missed the original games, and GOG gives them the opportunity to find out what all the fuss is about. In some cases people have to rely on retro games because a genre has fallen out of favour... point-and-click adventures or flight sims, for example.

Will humans and DRM ever learn to coexist peacefully? No. Give up.

There are really a lot of reasons to play retro games... if you don't need your games to use Unreal 3 tech or whatever, then USD 5.99 or USD 9.99 are damn good price points for countless hours of gaming.

Eurogamer: And finally finally, what's next for GOG.com? How do you plan to expand the site in the future?

Lukasz Kukawski: Right now we're working on another big update to the service. "Update 1" brought a virtual shelf to stack your GOG.com games on and it improved the forums. I can't say what's going to be in the second update, not to spoil the whole surprise, but it will add a lot of improvements to the community section! Can't really wait when it'll be launched. Aside of that we'll announce a number of deals that will expand the ever-growing catalogue of Good Old Games and make our users happy. After announcing Ubisoft, I'm sure publishers will stand in line to sell their back catalogue games on GOG.com [smiles].