Good Old Games Interviews

More sites sent in their questions to Good Old Games about the closure, relaunch and the site’s future goals now that they are out of beta. Joystiq interviews managing director Guillaume Rambourg, purely about the way the closure was handled.

Some folks are viewing the ploy as intentional — that you wanted to make folks upset and get vocal to increase the reach of GOG’s relaunch announcement. What do you say to those accusations?

As stressed previously, we had to close down anyway due to technical reasons. 98% of the code of our website was rewritten to be able to welcome more users and deliver a better experience, which required a major change in our backend and as a matter of fact, taking down our platform for a few days. Due to this situation, we had only two options in terms of communication: either making an official “boring” statement or taking a more creative route. We have been gamers forever and thus decided to pick the second option, as we believe the industry has been getting dead serious for the last few years. If even the entertainment industry which I believe is supposed to generate emotions and creativity gets dull, where is the whole world going? Our aim was never to harm anybody here. All we wanted is to take an exotic path to cause a debate. Luckily, this was the first and last time we had to take down our servers. In practice, this means our future major announcements will still be creative (we’ll never give up on that!), but without the slightly bitter part for our users.
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True or false: Any publicity is good publicity?

Hmmm … that’s quite a philosophical debate and I am not too sure we have enough time or ink to engage into a deep discussion here. However, I can launch the debate among your forum users by sharing one fact: the traffic on our website the day of our launch was 20 times higher than ever in the past. Everybody can draw his/her own conclusions! More seriously, it is all about what you call “publicity”. If you talk about generating buzz, anybody can do that. It is only a matter of imagination, not even time or money. If you talk about spreading a positive message, then it is more about the psychology you put behind your message and how it can become meaningful to users, which is a lot harder. We at GOG try to balance all those aspects since two years to promote PC classics and build up a lively relation with our users.

GameIndustry.biz’ Alec Meer also interviewed Guillaume Rambourg. The interview is behind a login, but the public quote has Rambourg stating “250 games more and they’re done”. A bit of a confusing quote, intended to mean that they will consider their catalogue “packed” at the 450 games mark but will still continue to add. The full quote reads:

“The thing is, I believe we are running after roughly 200 good old games,” he said, “and then I think the PC catalogue will be pretty much packed. There are only so many good old games. 450, 500 and then I think we’ll be done.”