http://playstationgang.com/gog-com-discusses-drm-piracy-next-gen-consoles-and-more/

Neat.

I pretty much stand behind most of GOG's ideas and reasoning's. I loved this part:

" Some people will always opt to take your IP for free. To hell with them. Instead, find the people who will pay for your product and treat them like kings. That is how you build brand loyalty. That is how you make people who don’t just buy the game you’re selling, but who want to buy the next one. And it’s how you solve piracy–as much as it can be solved."

The part I cringed a little on was the next part.

"So with that said, the fact that we’ve taken the #NoDRM approach makes a lot of sense if you think about who it is that we consider as the largest “digital distributor” in the market: pirates. We’ve deliberately designed our signup, purchase, and download process to be as quick and painless as possible, because if you compare the process of buying a game with DRM to downloading the game from a torrent, the stark difference in simplicity and user-friendliness is boggling."

I think the industry struggles with understanding who their customers are and who the criminals are. For some of us, we don't pirate games. Our money goes with our time. If you make a game that isn't consumer friendly, I won't buy it and I won't play it. I'm not at GOG because they made their service easier than pirating... I'm here because of the first quoted paragraph above... they treat me right and I pay for that. I'll keep paying for that too. To me, DRM doesn't mean go and pirate the game... it means, they don't want my business, I'll go somewhere else. I'm sure GOG didn't mean the answer the way I'm reading it, but I do think other companies fail to understand the market they are in. Oblivion didn't need DRM to break some sales records... yet piracy required Skyrim to need steamworks? That is messed up, and its due to a massive lack of understanding on the difference between customer and criminal.

From the interview:

"Our growth and development has a lot to do with us carefully listening to the voice of our community and doing our best to answer their needs, be it with new features, specific releases or new directions for GOG."

I wonder what the fellow GOG users here think about this. Is it true? Do they listen carefully to the voice of their community? Was their growth really dependent on this? Or is it mostly a phrase that sounds good?

I have not enough experience to compare their community orientation with other similar providers but my impression was always that new features could come a bit faster. Maybe I am too impatient and underestimate the efforts (with Linux, Downloaders, more games, ...). At least they also do not make steps in the wrong direction.

However my impression is that the site is largely the same as three years before but with more games and more frequent sales. But then even when they started selling fresh games there was half an outcry from people who wanted them to stick to old games (me included). Now I see how kind of 'stupid' this was.

I don't think they factor web services into the business model, at least in this case. They gave an example in the interview... 80% off games. They don't like it, but do it because that is what customers want.

Other examples can be found from their surveys. when the vocal minority pipes up on the forums, they released surveys to try and gauge the true direction of their customers.

For the web site, they did introduce a nice wishlist feature, but I haven't seen anything useful come from that. Games are still tied to companies that will work with GOG and that rarely equates to the most sought after games.

Other issues do seem very stagnant. The ability to ignore problematic users, forum organization, purchase methods, ability to make complex orders... those are still long time wishes with no status updates. But they do seem to listen... so I'm guessing the website is driven differently than overall operating standards of the company.

Am I the only one who pictures the interviewer constantly nodding in acknowledgement and saying "Mm-hm" as TeT talks?

Really weird habit of mine...

No.

Linux support had more votes than Mac on the wishlist but Mac support arrived first.

They chose Mac because it is easier and because they use Macs at GOG, not because it is what we wanted.

And then they throw some salt by coming up with nonsensical reasons why they won't, such as "We'd have to support Raspberry Pi" and "Linux is too fragmented", both of which are solved by picking one distribution and supporting that, which is no different from supporting the "XP", "Vista" or "7" distribution of Windows and the "1.982743+"[1] patchlevel of the "OS X" distribution of "Mac OS".

[1] I made this version number up because I can't be bothered to find the thread where someone complained their Mac GOG wouldn't work and were told there was a minor patchlevel version requirement for their OS.

Personally, I think they should just add Linux versions in the bonus section whenever the publisher makes them available, and specify they don't officially support them. Wouldn't that be a good idea ?

Yeah, similar story for me. I owned a few games physically but the majority of my games were pirated ISO files, when I found GOG I purchased the games I already had installed on my hard-drive, I then proceeded to uninstall my old pirated versions and reinstall the GOG versions.

It was partly because GOG's versions come pre-patched and "fixed" in some ways for modern systems, but also because I am OCD for having nice collections of legally owned games online, and being able to redownload them them, back them up etc, so it was certainly the service.

Yeah, that would be fine (by me at least). But they say they would then have to support them and they can't because they don't have any Linux people on staff (and the reasons I gave above).

"Does the good reviews most of these titles actually convert to good sales numbers? How successful has Indie games been on your service?"


Dead Playstationgang - ENGRISH !

You're not the first one to suggest this. Probably not even among the first 10 or 20. If only GOG would listen carefully and do their best... :)

This part rubs me the wrong way a bit: ... providing you are a Windows or Mac user.

GOG aren't going to fix their no-CD for Moto Racer 2 for me and I've spent a little more than 20 dollars (and refused their offer of a free game when they got it wrong the first time) :P

The thing about big discounts is that the base price of games don't drop as rapidly as they used to. Instead of a game dropping down to "bargain bin" pricing after only a year or two, these days the base prices drop very slowly but sales & special offers are a lot more frequent and offer progressively larger discounts.

Also with the lack of demos it makes sense to wait for a decent discount before you buy a game you're not 100% sure about. Imagine this logic applied to Windows. "We can't support Windows because..."

"...we'd have to support Windows Server"
"...we'd have to support Windows RT"
"...we'd have to support Windows Phone"
"...we'd have to support Windows Embedded"

Quick (and possibly silly) question. Can you disable Case Sensitivity for the mounted iso and see if the current crack works?