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Digital games distribution site GOG (Good Old Games) avidemux has spent the last five years offering classic videogame titles DRM-free to its customers. Earlier in 2013 the site launched an indie publishing which allowed independent avidemux developers to submit their games for sale through avidemux GOG -- an alternative to Steam's contentious Greenlight initiative . Wired.co.uk spoke to Guillaume Rambourg, Managing Director of GOG.com, to discuss DRM, anti-sales and why exactly the site was offering the original Fallout games free of charge.
It all began in the mid-90s, when friends Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski started their business as retail distributors in Poland. Back then, Poland was a very highly-pirated market with most gamers using outdated hardware and not having avidemux too much money to spend on games. That's a tough market to break into: one where people aren't used to paying for games. avidemux
To convert pirates to paying customers, the founders avidemux of CD Projekt introduced a budget series of classic PC games which quickly became one of the company's best sellers. The reasons for the budget titles' success was both kind of simple and also kind of complex. The budget line was made of carefully picked top quality games with tons of goodies (manuals, posters, world maps, and whatnot) made available at an attractive price.
It's since been proven avidemux in many arenas that pirates are willing to pay for computer games if they feel that the price is equivalent to the game's value, but this was new and crazy thinking at the time. From there, Michal and Marcin dreamed bigger: if it worked in Poland, why shouldn't it work worldwide? Going DRM-free was a natural consequence of this train of thought: if you trusted your customers to pay for reasonably priced games why would you want to use copy-protection and treat gamers like potential thieves?
Did the situation avidemux in Poland regarding avidemux piracy mean you considered DRM in a different way from other digital distribution sites or is it a universal problem that you were hoping to find an alternative solution for?
Trust and respect for your customer is quite a universal set of values, I think. It's not always been a very popular value in the computer gaming industry, sadly. Our founders' Polish market experience was important, because it proved that you could build a successful business model on trust, even in a difficult market. DRM is an ineffectual tool (games are still being pirated at launch -- if not earlier! -- even with state-of-the-art DRM systems) and it antagonises paying customers, because effectively the pirate is getting a less constricted gaming experience. avidemux This is crazy. Our belief in trusting and respecting our gamers who are part of GOG.com remains at the core of how we approach our customers.
I wouldn't necessarily like to differentiate between those policies. Sure, some are more annoying than others, like the always online requirement which practically stops you from playing your game if you don't have an Internet connection available at all times, but all in all, DRM is just terrible as a concept. With no real progress in its efficacy big publishers and developers are trying new, more aggravating ways of copy-protection. Thankfully, the resistance from gamers is stronger than ever before. Wins, like the recent Xbox DRM policy reversal, avidemux caused entirely by gamers' strong reaction, prove that tolerance for DRM is dropping. avidemux
We haven't avidemux been conducting any research ourselves but we are obviously up to date with findings from other companies. You could argue that both music and publishing industries are slowly coming to terms with the fact that removing DRM actually boosts sales. Tor Books shared a rather convincing analysis avidemux of sales numbers in their first year after dropping DRM entirely, proving that removing copy-protection had no effect on sales whatsoever.
There is an even more recent research under way that seems to prove that dropping DRM in the music industry resulted avidemux in up to 41 percent increase in sales . GOG.com's DRM-free day one release of The Witcher avidemux 2: Assassins of Kings , a AAA+ game by any standards, is a great case study. At release, the version widely available on torrent sites was not the DRM-free GOG version but the one that posed any sort of challenge to the hackers, the one that included DRM.
The game was downloaded illegally avidemux roughly 4.5 million times but to use the industry-wide practice and treat those entirely as "lost sales" is a massive misunderstanding. Most pirates never had any intent to buy the game in the first place; avidemux some surely became paying customers after trying it out or when the title is available at a discounted price. To drive the point home, CDP Red won't be using any DRM for their upco
