DRM is poison. It provides only negative value to the consumer by adding new restrictions and limitations.<p>Valve seems to be one of the few companies to make use of DRM that understands this. Steam may be heavily encumbered with DRM but Valve has piled on huge loads of sugar to make it palatable, more and more each year. Steam is more than just a DRM system, of course, and it's all of the benefits of the Steam-platform which make up for the poison at its heart (at least for a great many consumers). Additionally, because of the track-record of steep price drops on old games and the occasional steam-sale they blunt many of the down-sides of DRM (such as lack of used-games).<p>Some game companies only see DRM from the narrow perspective of a publisher concerned about "piracy" and feel entitled to dictate usage terms to their customer base due to feelings of ethical superiority. This is mistaken, and by abusing and misusing their customers they're destroying brand loyalty, which is perhaps the most important thing a company can have, especially one predominantly working in IP.
I have more than 60 GoG games. Most bought during their awesome collection sales. I have nothing but praise for GoG and all my dealings with them. They <i>are</i> the answer to piracy in that they make acquiring and owning games easier, and better than pirating them. I've bought a few games from them I had illegal copies of. Why? No DRM, extra stuff, the "right" price and this...<p>"The games are always remastered for modern operating systems as well, making them playable on new machines."<p>I haven't even played some of those 60 games. Bought as part of "deals" and in some sense I'm happy to give money to GoG for being fair / awesome and my trust / desire for them to continue doing so and thriving as a company and business model.<p>Being decent with customers, works.
Treating your customers as humans is good business.<p>Customers pay and pirates plunder.<p>Software pirates will find a way to steal things they are unwilling to pay for. The smart companies in software will work to serve their customers and leverage the pirates for their one valuable quality - free marketing and distribution.<p>Another way to look at it is the reason the F2P + micro transactions works is the same reason that shareware works, lower the friction to enjoy the product and make it easy to share. Sharing is valuable.<p>Video game companies are so much hoping to stop piracy or used game sales that they forget that sharing a game with friends is free advertising and marketing for them.<p>If League of Legends wasn't free, I probably wouldn't have tried it, but because it is free to play a lot of my friends have played, purchased, and enjoyed the service. Apparently Team Fortress 2 makes 3x more money as F2P than a traditional $50 boxed game.<p>To me it boils down to getting your product into the hands of people who are willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it without DRM, adding DRM won't make you more money, it will just piss off the people who were willing to pay you in the first place.<p>I'm kind of surprised how many of my hardcore gamer friends are anti Xbox One already simply because of the way MSFT is going to handle used games and DRM. They're losing the hearts and minds of their core market.
Unfortunately, GOG's pricing seems too high in <i>ahem</i> less developed countries like Russia. While "one world fair price" policy sounds right and fair (and certainly has advantages, as I've heard there's a problem with EU vs US prices), it only works for countries with similar average incomes.<p>For comparison (no games are on sale or other kind of promotion in either store):<p>- Legend of Grimrock and Don't Starve (both have equal prices): 14.99 USD on GOG, 299 RUR (9.42 USD) on Steam;<p>- Fallout 2: 9.99 USD on GOG, 199 RUR (6.28 USD) on Steam;<p>- Deus Ex: 9.99 USD on GOG, 150 RUR (4.73 USD) on Steam.<p>Not like $10 (~317 RUR, about two 0.5L bottles of a good beer) isn't affordable (it totally is, if we're talking about single purchase), but, still, paying 25-50% more than usual local market price feels quite significant in the long-term. Given that Steam's DRM is relatively unobtrusive and don't seem to bother most gamers, I doubt lack of DRM is significant to many consumers, compared to price.
It's great to see GOG receive more attention. I will note that GOG hasn't stood for "Good Old Games" for quite some time now. It's not just GOG, with no official expansion. They are easily my favourite games retailer (I choose not to purchase DRMed digital media, so are one of the few available choices).<p>Now that GOG are packaging up some of their releases of old games for OSX using WINE, I suspect it's only a matter of time before they support Linux officially.<p>EDIT to add: the fact they offer the same price worldwide is also a massive point in their favour vs just about every other retailer (no insane price hike for Europeans or Australians).
I am a fan of theirs since their beta period :)<p>In fact, I like them so much I bought more games than I even downloaded...<p>And The Witcher 2 is the ONLY game EVER that I pre-ordered, and the ONLY game EVER that I paid more than 30 USD, just because of CD Projekt sheer awesomeness.<p>By the way, I created my GOG.com account to buy Screamers, I suggest you people do the same, very obscure, but very fun racing game (that needs quite a bit of processing power, it was released before Pentium was invented, and designed to only work in full graphics with Pentium! Very crazy stuff!)
CD Projekt has figured it out in nineties. Everybody pirated games in Poland (the prices weren't adjusted for purchasing power, nobody did localizations [except pirates - Russian CDs with illegal bothed Polish-Russian localization of English games was on every street market for 20-30 PLN, when same game was 150-200 PLN and had no localization]). That was before CD recorders were available cheaply, so pirates were earning big money on that.<p>CD Projekt somehow persuaded Bioware to let them do proper localization of Baldurs Gate, hired the best Polish actors for voiceovers (think Morgan Freeman hired by small publisher in USA when everybody knows nobody buys games), did all the coding by themselves, and priced the product reasonably. And it was (maybe still is) the single biggest hit on Polish gaming market. By order of magnitude.<p>I'm glad they continue with that attitude towards customers.
It's great to see that there is a successful games distribution service which understands that DRM doesn't do anything good and only reduces the value of the product for the legitimate customers. I avoid Steam, but use GOG because of their DRM free stance.<p>The only thing they lack is selling Linux titles. While many (but not all) of their Windows games work with Wine, in addition of course to DosBox and Scummvm games which are easily playable on Linux, it's still good to have native Linux titles too. There is a proposal for them to start doing it (you can vote on it since GOG is asking for feedback on this matter):<p><a href="http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/add_linux_versions_of_games" rel="nofollow">http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/add_linux_versions_of_games</a><p>DRM free distributor with Linux games would make GOG an unquestionable preference.
I remember one of the founders of GOG being a part of the ZX Spectrum scene in Poland back in the eighties. He was sort of a major hub in the sneakernet where cassette tapes where the packets, snail mail was the backbone and walking around was the local network. Piracy wasn't even a word, everybody was "obtaining" games. No wonder GOG "get" gamers - their experience with the market goes 30 years back :)
It's interesting that they are expanding from good <i>old</i> games and bringing in a lot of good indie titles as well. I see them growing as a credible, DRM-free competitor to Steam outside the AAA, $60 game market.
The DRM argument will continue forever. It only hurts those who already want the product. Yes, maybe you gain a couple of extra sales, but you probably lose out many more because of all the extra hoops you make your legitimate customers jump through.<p>Oh, and I just bought SimCity 2000. There goes all my free time.
FYI:
There are tons of DRM free games on Steam
<a href="http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_steam/page1" rel="nofollow">http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_st...</a><p>The recently released, higly anticipated System Shock 2 is also DRM free.<p>Easy way to test a game:
Download it then close the Steam client. Run the game from the folder. If it starts = DRM free
I'm glad GOG is getting some publicity. I much prefer them to Steam. The Steam client has always been clunky to me on all three supported platforms. I also don't like the social aspect. GOG gives me a downloadable game for easy transfer, gives me the ability to log in and re-download, their customer service is superb and it's pretty cheap. Come to think of it, I'd be more than willing to pay over the standard $10 for their games.
I think it's kind of sad that they mention "GOG.com" over and over without a hyperlink. The author links to two games on their site (Might & Magic and Night of the Rabbit), but not their home page. Why do old media companies avoid linking to sites they write about?
Anyone know Polish and is able to summarise for us the key GOG.com-related figures from <a href="http://www.cdprojekt.com/resources/document/prezentacje/Wyniki_1_kwartal_2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cdprojekt.com/resources/document/prezentacje/Wyni...</a>?
The big game publishers are probably foaming at the mouth over GoG taking off with no DRM and mostly decade(s) old computer games. I can only imagine it's a huge kick in the balls to EA, Blizzard, etc.