GOG Interview

While not specifically RPG-focused, we have always dedicated a part of our coverage to Good Old Games (recently rebranded as GOG), and I expect our readers will be interested to read this short interview from Rock, Paper, Shotgun with managing director Guillaume Rambourg. Here’s a particularly controversial point on Steam sales:

(Heavy discounts are bad for gamers,) Rambourg explained. (If a gamer buys a game he or she doesn’t want just because it’s on sale, they’re being trained to make bad purchases, and they’re also learning that games aren’t valuable. We all know gamers who spend more every month on games than they want to, just because there were too many games that were discounted too deeply. That’s not good for anyone.)

(We provide a lot of value in our games that goes beyond just the price. This is one of the key ways we fight against piracy, after all: providing gamers with more value than a pirate does. We actually generate more than half of our revenue from full-price sales, simply because we keep our prices reasonable in the first place. Our average sale tends to be around 40% 50% off; that’s plenty of incentive to pick up a game if you’re interested or if you just think you might like to try it because you’re not sure about the game, but not some crazy 75% or 85% discount that damages the long-term value of a game.)