Zachary Knight (better known as EZK around GamePolitics) has written an interesting article at TechDirt about Good Old Games CEO Guillaume Rambourg's comments to Edge Magazine about how keeping games DRM-free has helped his company make money and has kept its customers happy. Rambourg is preparing to give a presentation at the London Game Conference about how eliminating DRM from The Witcher 2 has impacted sales. Here is what he told Edge about that situation:
"I will be sharing the sales numbers on GOG compared to the competition. I think the numbers will speak for themselves, what DRM-free sales of even a triple-A title can achieve. Our values are universal and they don't only apply to older content. They apply to triple-A, day-one releases. I certainly look forward to learning more about what this experience has to show other developers but I am glad he still leaves plenty to glean from this interview. He continues by explaining that publishers have always had the ability to do exactly what GOG is doing, but they refused to do it, citing unreasonable expenses for low returns. In the early days of GOG, they were met with animosity from publishers over the idea of releasing older games. These publishers didn't want to dedicate time and resources to preparing these games to run on modern computers. They figured it was a losing strategy."
Rambourg also briefly talked to Edge about DRM, the company's catalog of DRM-free classic PC games, and how it is working with abandonware sites to clean up the online scene:
"When we sign content for GOG, we contact abandonware websites and make them our affiliates. So they remove the illegal content, and instead they put a GOG banner and they direct sales and traffic to us. Step by step, we are cleaning up the market and we are making the back catalogue segment a visible, and viable, market for the industry."
Rambourg will reveal sales numbers for The Witcher 2 at the conference, but it sounds like the game did pretty well because it didn’t force users to deal with some crazy DRM scheme. EZK offers some thoughtful analysis on the interview here.
Source: TechDirt
