Good Old Games Interview

GameZone has an interview with CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski. The interview predates his recent resignation and discusses the GOG relaunch.

GameZone: Do you believe the relaunch was a success?

Iwinski: Yes, I believe it was. Actually, I should have mentioned it in the previous point – the main challenge was the traffic on the day we opened the new GOG.com. Although the new code accelerated the whole site by four to six times and we added several new servers, we got 20 times the highest traffic we’d ever had. That’s good, as it means that the idea of good old gaming has spread successfully but, at the same time, although the IT set up was several times faster than before, it still wasn’t working as fast as we were planning. Fortunately, we managed to add more server power quickly on the day of launch. Thanks to that we got where we planned to be in terms of the user experience.

GameZone: Considering that some gamers seem angry by the hoax, do you regret doing it?

Iwinski: We never had the intention of making anybody angry or harm them in any way. As I have mentioned before, we believe we planted some good hints that the site wasn’t actually shutting down, but right after we saw comments from the most confused and, yes, sometimes quite angry users, we immediately posted an update with clarifications and then a teaser trailer on Tuesday directly hinting at the new design/relaunch of the site and the arrival of Baldur’s Gate. Finally, we decided to host our conference on Wednesday dressed as monks, and asked for forgiveness and redemption. We stated then and still feel that we are sorry if anybody felt bad about the “unusual” relaunch strategy, but being old-school gamers and remembering a more relaxed and more guerrilla-like industry (instead of the corporate world these days), we decided to plan something else.

Do we regret it? Definitely not, but could we have handled some things differently? I am sure we could. We won’t take the site down like that again, but we’re not done doing some crazy things on the marketing side.