PC Gamer interviewed CD Projekt about GOG - Good Old Games:
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Thanks henriquejr!GOG's 10 year journey to bring old games back to life
An oral history of Good Old Games: How it began, and how they track down classic games and make them work again.
10 years ago, not long after a young CD Projekt had founded a development studio and released The Witcher, the company founded something else: GOG.com. Back then, though, GOG wasn't just GOG. It was Good Old Games, a new digital store aimed at selling only old games. So much has changed about the way we buy and play games in that decade, it's hard to remember that that was, in 2008, a strange idea.
Digital distribution is now normal. DRM-free games are pretty normal, too, and so is selling classic games. But GOG had to be pioneer these concepts as its inexperienced team of upstarts from Eastern Europe built a platform, convinced developers and publishers to join them, learned to become IP rights detectives, and figured out how to make old software run on new hardware.
This is the story of how Good Old Games began, and how GOG today tracks down classic games and makes them work again, in the words of some of GOG's key players.
Good old days
When GOG managing director Piotr Karwowski started working at CD Projekt as a web designer 20 years ago, they faced a serious problem: game piracy in Poland was rife.
Piotr Karwowski: In the early 2000s, before CD Projekt got into game development, we were distributing games in boxes. Piracy in Poland was a big issue, but what were immensely popular were rereleases of classics in a mid-price format, where in one box you could find Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment all for $15, packed with maps. It was all about focusing on value to fight piracy, and also making it hassle free, with no activations so it worked out of the box.
Years later, as digital distribution rose, CD Projekt founders Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński saw potential in using what they'd learned in fighting piracy for something new.
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