GOG - DRM-Free Works

Couchpotato

Part-Time News-bot
Joined
October 1, 2010
Messages
36,073
Location
Spudlandia
Games.On.Net has the second part of the interview with GOG about why drm free works.

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.”
More information.
 
Joined
Oct 1, 2010
Messages
36,073
Location
Spudlandia
If only more companies agreed, instead even gog now have to accept games with DRM (relatively mild, to begin with, but it could be a slippery slope) as they naturally want to keep expanding their catalog.
 
Joined
Jul 14, 2013
Messages
24
Location
Greece
“We don’t have anybody whose focus is restoring old content at this company, so we have no idea who you should talk to.”

Cynically put = "we didn't care - until now, where you showed us new ways to make new money with old content."

And it's an insult to those artists/developers who actually *did* this "old content", too !
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,893
Location
Old Europe
this is the kind of money we had experience with and EA was like, “Eh.”
Sorry GOG but to impress EA you need to be Maxis:
- grab all E3 awards for the idea then make the most boring game ever (Spore)
- release expensive DLC every couple of months (Sims)
- integrate into an singleplayer instant hit always online DRM (SimCitey)

In any case, thanks to GOG I've trashed piles of dusty boxes, faulty CDs and ruined manuals, instead I have almost all games in their digital library now. And my room feels cleaner.
 
Joined
Apr 12, 2009
Messages
23,459
Ever thought of the people seeking for the potential gems you thrashed away ?
Why would anyone want faulty CDs and ruined manuals?
 
Joined
Jul 14, 2013
Messages
24
Location
Greece
Ever thought of the people seeking for the potential gems you thrashed away ?

I'm not a fraudulent creature so I'm not selling nor buying stuff on ebay, thankye.
 
Joined
Apr 12, 2009
Messages
23,459
What do you mean by that?
 
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
4,353
Location
Austin, TX
By that I mean you can't buy or sell Britney Spears' spit in PDF format on GOG.
 
Joined
Apr 12, 2009
Messages
23,459
Back
Top Bottom