Games.On.Net has the second part of the interview with GOG about why drm free works.
More information.GON: Now obviously GOG has been about no DRM from the start – has that ever caused any problems with any of your relationships with traditional publishers? Or any developers that you’ve spoken to who have wanted to release something — maybe you’ve said, “Hey, we’d love to release your old game on GOG,” and they’ve said, “Oh, but you don’t have any DRM, do you?” Has that ever been a sticking point?
Trevor: It can be. There’s a very persuasive argument we have, which is money. You speak to a developer or you speak to a publisher and you say, “But look at all the money we’ve made!” They’re like, “I guess this ‘no DRM’ thing can work!” Of course, for certain scales of money, you know — we went to EA, not initially, not in the very beginning. At the beginning we were like, “Well, we’ve been open for three months and we’ve sold this many games” and this is the kind of money we had experience with and EA was like, “Eh.” They wouldn’t have cared about that much money because we were a brand new company that had just started.
GON: Yeah, small change.
Trevor: Then we added EA what, eighteen months ago, I think. Maybe a little bit more than that. By that point we had Interplay, Activision, Atari, I think we had Ubisoft by then. So we had this stable of big companies who had joined in and we had a large user base and we just said, “This is where we are, this is what we’re doing.” There are still some problems, but the problems are increasingly less about “We don’t want DRM-free games for our classics” and more like either, “Man, we don’t know who owns the rights for this,” or just, “We don’t have anybody whose focus is restoring old content at this company, so we have no idea who you should talk to.”