Good Old Games: GOG.com And The DRM-Free Revolution - Forbes

Guillaume Rambourg

“DRM solves piracy like a bag of concrete solves hunger.”

That’s GOG.com managing director Guillaume Rambourg, eloquently summarizing his views on DRM—Digital Rights Management—the copy protection measures many entertainment media companies put in place to thwart piracy.

But Rambourg isn’t convinced DRM even works, or that DRM and the piracy it purports to try and prevent are even related to one another in any meaningful way.

“Pirates remove the DRM from the games before they ever play them,”  he tells me. “The people who have to put up with DRM are the very people who shouldn’t have to bother with it: legitimate customers.”

GOG.com (short for Good Old Games) is a digital distributor of both old and new PC titles. The site is a part of the Poland-based CD Projekt group, which also includes Witcher 2 developer CD Projekt RED.

The site is more than just a place to slake your nostalgia, though for anyone who played PC games back in the 80′s and 90′s it will certainly do just that with its catalog of classic titles.

You can find all sorts of games you might have played in the good old days—my beloved old Might & Magic games, for instance, which I own still but only on floppy discs for a long forgotten Mac operating system. Here, they’ve been remastered to work with modern operating systems.

Icewind Dale, Wizardry, Ultima…the list goes on and on.

I’ve even found more obscure titles like Blade of Darkness, a game every fan of Dark Souls should play to learn where that game drew its inspiration for combat. System Shock 2 came to the site around the same time as Ken Levine’s BioShock Infinite was launched, just so we could all compare Levine’s newer game with his classic.

A Brief History of CD Projekt and GOG.com

Founded by Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski, CD Projekt started out as a retail game distributor in Poland in the 1990′s, not long after the fall of the Berlin wall.

“Back in those days,” Rambourg tells me, Poland’s economy “was rather fragile and piracy was the most popular channel for gamers to get a chance to play their favorite titles from the West.”

Hardware was also expensive, so many Polish gamers played older games that would run properly on older machines—older games that they tended to pirate. In order to get gamers to actually buy games rather than pirate them, CD Projekt struck upon a novel idea: make purchasing games convenient and affordable.

“They introduced a budget series of classic PC games to Polish gamers,” says Rambourg, “very often localized into their native language along with the game manual, beefed up with some goodies (stickers, posters, etc), in a nice-looking box, and for a very reasonable price.”

That series, Rambourg says, was a tipping point for many Polish gamers who decided to give “legal gaming” a try. It was a huge success for CD Projekt, not only garnering the respect and business of a number of new gamers, but helping them seal deals with publishers worldwide.

A decade later, with the rise of broadband internet and the increasing expense and competition in the video game industry, both piracy and the use of ever more invasive DRM were on the rise. So CD Projekt came up with the idea of GOG.com—a digital distributor modeled after the success of CDP’s earlier brick-and-mortar model.

GOG.com differs from its biggest competitor—Valve’s enormously successful Steam platform—in a number of ways. The site offers games at the same price worldwide with no regional pricing. Each game you purchase comes with digital goodies such as the game’s soundtrack, a digital manual, desktop wallpapers, and so forth.

The games are always remastered for modern operating systems as well, making them playable on new machines.

Perhaps most importantly, each and every title comes entirely DRM-free. This includes titles from many of GOG.com’s partners, such as Ubisoft, that you might not normally associate with DRM-free games.

A beta version of GOG.com was launched in 2008 with a few titles available from Interplay, the site’s first partner. The 2-year beta saw the signing of over 100 partners including big publishers and independent studios. GOG.com released nearly 500 classic games, reaching over 1.7 million gamers per month.

Then, in 2011 the site launched its first new title: CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher 2, which sold 40,000 copies through GOG.com in its first three months. Valve’s much larger Steam platform sold 200,000 in the same time frame,  but CDP viewed the event as a massive success. After all, GOG.com’s user base was far smaller and they still sold a fifth the number of units, and each one DRM free.

At this point, CD Projekt’s influence and respect had grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where the Polish Prime Minister gave president Obama a copy of The Witcher 2 as a gift on his visit to Poland.

The success of The Witcher 2 on GOG.com convinced the company ”to expand beyond just selling classic games and therefore sell new content as well,” says Rambourg. It’s also why they started offering some games on Mac OS X.

The DRM-free revolution had begun.

The DRM-free Revolution

Kickstarter is an interesting parallel to GOG.com’s success.

The games we see funding on Kickstarter would have a hard time funding through traditional channels, but gamers obviously have a deep hunger for these sorts of “new classic” games.

The spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment pulled in over $4 million on the crowdfunding site. Obsidian’s CRPG Project Eternityraised nearly as much. Indeed, many of the developers whose classic games appear on GOG.com are now participating in the Kickstarter movement, and virtually every one of these promises a DRM-free version of their game.

Gamers are as hungry for an older way of doing business as they are for these classic games. Video game consumers have been hit hard with DRM, with always-online schemes, and with other industry decisions like day-one DLC and locked on-disc content that are rightfully seen as anti-consumer and short-sighted.

Witcher 3 Project Lead, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, told me recently that he believed DRM is the “worst thing in the video game industry.”

Rambourg describes DRM as reactionary, likening it to an allergic response. “A natural response,” he says, “but not a helpful one.”

The use of DRM signals a lack of trust between producers of games and their target consumers, says Rambourg. Worse, DRM can often break the game itself. Rambourg notes that nowadays “there are even games that require the gamer to be permanently connected to the internet to actually launch and play his favorite title.”

This isn’t just an inconvenience for people with poor internet connections, he points out. It’s bad for the longevity of games and the industry.

“It’s hard for the industry to think this way,” Rambourg says, “but consider this: if Zork I had an always-on internet connection requirement, do you think it would still be possible to sell the game 33 years later and have it work? It does work just fine on GOG.com, and the rights holders make revenue on this great old classic, but that’s because it’s not crippled with a short-sighted DRM policy. Of course, it wasn’t possible to use DRM like that back in the day, but I think it’s best for all of us who like seeing the classics that shaped gaming that it wasn’t.”

Always-online should be reserved for MMORPGs, Rambourg says, because large online games are built with an always-online internet connection in mind. It’s the point of this sort of game.

“However,” he says, “using an “always-online” feature for games that very much look and taste like single player titles is really a worrying trend to me and just like any short-sighted fasion out there, I hope it will just vanish in a near future.”

We’ve seen plenty of examples of always-online DRM breaking games already.

Diablo III not only had a botched launch, Blizzard’s latest action-RPG has no user mods thanks to its always-online nature. This stands in stark contrast not just with the previous Diablo games, but with the competition. Torchlight 2 is a modder’s paradise, and while it’s not quite the same type of game, CDP’s Witcher 2 recently had its own suite of modding tools released upon the world.

EA’s SimCity 5 had an even more disastrous launch than Diablo III. Worse still, the reasons developer Maxis gave for making the game always-online were quickly debunked. The video game industry has much to learn about its customer base.

The music industry has already started to learn these lessons, Rambourg says. So have book publishers as DRM-free eBooks have become more and more common. Even Hollywood is starting to understand how damaging DRM can be to their products. In time, the video game industry will learn the same lessons—hopefully.

In the meantime, GOG.com and CD Projekt continue to grow.

One factor in GOG.com’s success is the relatively small team of just 45 employees, making it  ”surprisingly easy to make most of our decisions: we think about what we would like a digital distribution store to do, and then try to do that.”

Mostly, however, Rambourg thinks the company’s success boils down to something simple: customer service.

“We treat our gamers like humans,” he says, “not criminals—and I think this is why our community is so active and faithful.”

Like any relationship, fostering trust between a business and its customers is crucial, and CD Projekt and GOG.com have figured out how to cultivate trust and respect with a tough crowd: gamers. The video game industry should take note. Abandoning DRM may sound risky, but abandoning your customer base is a far greater threat to the bottom line. If anything, CD Projekt and GOG.com have illustrated how important service is to the video game industry, and how adding value and treating customers with respect can pay dividends.

Currently CD Projekt RED is working on their upcoming RPG The Witcher 3. GOG.com is busy bringing new games to their catalog, including the just-released Night of the Rabbit.

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