Good Old Games Interviews

Gamasutra and Shacknews have each published interviews with CD Projekt’s Tom Ohle about their newly announced DRM-free Good Old Games service. A snip from Gamasutra’s article:

Has it been difficult to find support from publishers and developers?

TO: I think that a lot of publishers are excited about the prospect of making money from their back catalogue games. A lot of the stuff we’re trying to get is abandonware, so it seems natural that publishers would be interested in monetizing those titles.

That being said, we’ve held off on approaching some major publishers because we’re guessing that the lack of copy protection will be a point of concern. In those cases we’re going to make sure we present a strong case for the site.

We’re expecting gamers will be really happy with GOG.com and we can then use strong sales to convince any reluctant publishers that they don’t have to fear the lack of DRM or low prices. In the end, we want gamers to be able to play the games they want to
play.

And a snip from Shacknews’ article:

Shack: If there’s isn’t any copy protection, aren’t you concerned about piracy? How do you ensure this will be a profitable and long-lasting enterprise?

Tom Ohle: Realistically, it’s probably out of our hands. What we wanted to do is kind of, provide that unique value in terms of–it’s something that other competitors don’t offer. Separate just from the games catalog itself, every other digital distribution platform basically requires some kind of online authentication, some sort of copy protection in there.

For us, it’s basically log into your account and download any game [you’ve bought], any time. The concern about piracy is something that we’ve gotten from publishers, who kinda go, “We’ll give you these games, you sell them, and then they’ll just be out on torrents immediately.”

We’re hoping that with the low price point–we’re also adding a bunch of added value features. For some of the key games, we’re gonna have really in-depth game guides. And just trying to have that low price point, plus the no DRM, sort of working on a bit of an honor system.

The gamers that we’re targeting are going to end up being a more mature audience anyways, because they’re these hardcore, old-school PC gamers. For $5.99 or $9.99, it’s pretty cheap. Hopefully people won’t be too tempted to copy it and give it to their buddies, because it’s pretty cheap. And hopefully the more sales we get, obviously, the more likely we are to bring on additional publishers and different titles. If everyone’s pirating games right off the bat, then I guess we’d be in a bit of trouble.