...mostly around availability of Hasbro titles. Were they not aware that they were re-released fairly recently (November last year, I believe) and are readily available on almost every major online store? If they were genuinely under the impression that BG was impossible to obtain and that releasing it here was a massive thing, then I guess it shows a fairly major hole in researching the title. It's very very misleading and possibly libellous to claim that you cannot get them anywhere at all except for GOG, as that simply isn't the case.

Yeah, I chuckled when I read that... I assume it's just good old fashioned misdirection for the cause of advertising.

I've been confused about why people were so jazzed for D&D games for a while now, as they are so easy and cheap to obtain DRM free in retail collections. Same with the old Sierra adventure games.

If it's the case they should probably be careful, as again that could potentially be taken as libellous.

Well, it is partly true; the only place to find Baldur's Gate on digital distribution is here at GOG, for the moment.

Besides, everyone does a little misleading advertising once in a while, eh? ;)

D&D games have been disappearing from other DD sites since the lawsuit. It seems they need to be Hasbro approved now. Which GOG is.

Retail copies were released not so long ago. But mostly only in the UK, oddly enough. And the existence of Plane Scape in particular was utterly denied by all parties.

Which makes this sentence: bizarre. The BG boxset of both games + expansions is still well in stock on Amazon, which ships internationally.

And that's why we have the Advertising Standards Authority, in the UK ;)

They could be operating on outdated information. It wasn't re-released all that long ago and it's completely in contrast to what's happening on the DD circuit and in other countries in general. So it's probably just a case of unfortunate misinformation. Without people in the UK they're going to be ignorant of the fact that it's any different here.

Not only that but on the US site they sell the UK version as well, for $15 with normal shipping rates.

If they're ignorant of what's happening in the UK they shouldn't be explicitly talking about it. I also expect that someone responsible for a company would fact-check before making such claims. Seeing as they've obviously negotiated with Hasbro and Atari over this specific product, I'm extremely surprised they didn't already know it anyway.

Which I happened to buy no more than a month ago.

I somehow doubt there were any real rights issues, otherwise they'd have been pulled from release pretty damn quickly. I thought it was apparent that Hasbro/Atari had given the newly reformed Interplay retail distribution rights.

That still doesn't change the fact that even the most basic of searches would have revealed them on sale. To not even bother checking before going 'well, you can't really buy BG anywhere, especially in the UK' is astonishing. I'd expect that from a fanboy argument on a forum, not from a business lead in a professional magazine interview.

It's not libel dude (with the IANAL caveat),
To my knowledge, libel is only really enforceable against the publisher. It is possible to sue people for statements they make, but you have to do a lot more work, and it needs to be a lot more on the nose than that.
More importantly there was no defamation - suggesting a product is harder to obtain than it is would be a difficult case to prove defamation, even to an american court.

EDIT: bloody quote markup - couldn't they spend some of those 3 days fixing that.

On the face of it, that would be a reasonable assumption. But then that doesn't explain why Interplay claim that Atari have the rights and must have been responsible for the release and Atari equally deny all knowledge of its re-emergence.

That doesn't strike me as a particularly clean cut situation. Especially seeing as Plane Scape has long been left in IP limbo with nobody knowing who owns what.

Also note that Interplay aren't newly reformed. The company was utterly gutted by Titus who have since taken the name for themselves and done little else since but leech off of old IPs they had no hand in creating.

As for GOG's comments. It was a mistake. It's not like it was a planned press conference or something. They're not going to be able to research their potential answers to every possible question.