I just watched this and while we all understand what GOG does as a business, I found it interesting to hear Marcin dissect their approach. A pretty cool presentation overall and one hopes their philosophy will rub off on others in the industry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6P3yOTR2Vc

Thanks, bookmarked.

Awesome lecture. Great for study background.

Thanks OP.Bookmarked :)


"Community, Value,Satisfaction"

Nice. Most stores are missing the Community as aspect :D

It's interesting to see them break their entire business model down in terms of basic psychology: treat the customer like humans, not consumers; give legit customers an experience that's easier than pirating; compete with brick and mortar by emulating that experience. It's fucking brilliant really, and telling that none of the major NA game companies have ever thought to try these things. The don't have the balls for it. Best part of the vid is at 37:13, where a guy asks them about Steam encroaching on the old games market. Both Marcin and Rambourg really get their hackles up. It's pretty cool.

thanks for the link. watching it now :)

I started watching it, couldn't finish, stuff came up. Why did they say they are about community... the gog community consists of a tiny featureless forum. I still think gog has the best customer service out of all digital game distributors, by far. Steam/Origin get a zero from me in customer service.

Agreed on that point.

A very interesting presentation.

Thanks for the post, scampywiak. Nice to here from the people behind this service.

Thanks for the link, downloaded it to view later on Sunday afternoon :-)

I liked how they described supportive forum members being like good and faithful soldiers. Even better, they didn't act like the trolls should be lumped in the supporters (fans) or pretend there was no meaningful distinction.

I've run into some incredibly ignorant attitudes elsewhere on the net that did exactly those things -and excused treating fans (fellow human beings who happened to love your work) as lesser creatures (easily replaced if they displease you) because there might be a psycho around in the community somewhere. Usually this largely was an excuse for unbridled egotism and a way to dismiss constructive criticisms. These types insist that everyone should be sycophants when speaking to them (or go away) - rather proving that someone has some psycho issues, though it may not be the fans with the biggest mental issues. lol

Extra Kudos to the GoG people for avoiding that whole scene! This is another aspect of GoG's business philosophy that others would do well to consider. Thanks, GoG!

Well the last company to treat their customers like thinking human beings didn't fare so well. I think JCPenny used rounded numbers for pricing (say a product was 14.99, they simply rounded up to 15.00), had done away with a lot of clearance sales and stopped the practice of over pricing a product and then setting it to a "sale" price. For all that JCPenny was rewarded near annihilation this year (after two years of the using the above strategy). I'm sure some other elements really contributed to the JCPenny failed business strategy, but a lot of the investors came away with the basic idea that treating customers as thinking people and not using sheep psychology wasn't very profitable. I remember seeing a youtube video that explained what happened more succinctly than I am, all I could find was this article. That being said I'm glad GOG is thriving and able to treat customers as people. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sanjay-sanghoee/why-jcpenney-is-a-case-st_b_3824206.html

Steam / Origin Are a Virus!