
After all, GOG.com's user base was far smaller and they still sold a fifth the number of units, and each one DRM free.Īt this point, CD Projekt's influence and respect had grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where the Polish Prime Minister gave president Obama a copy of The Witcher 2 as a gift on his visit to Poland. Valve's much larger Steam platform sold 200,000 in the same time frame, but CDP viewed the event as a massive success. Then, in 2011 the site launched its first new title: CD Projekt RED's The Witcher 2, which sold 40,000 copies through GOG.com in its first three months. GOG.com released nearly 500 classic games, reaching over 1.7 million gamers per month. The 2-year beta saw the signing of over 100 partners including big publishers and independent studios. This includes titles from many of GOG.com's partners, such as Ubisoft, that you might not normally associate with DRM-free games.Ī beta version of GOG.com was launched in 2008 with a few titles available from Interplay, the site's first partner. Perhaps most importantly, each and every title comes entirely DRM-free. The games are always remastered for modern operating systems as well, making them playable on new machines. Each game you purchase comes with digital goodies such as the game's soundtrack, a digital manual, desktop wallpapers, and so forth. The site offers games at the same price worldwide with no regional pricing. GOG.com differs from its biggest competitor-Valve's enormously successful Steam platform-in a number of ways.

So CD Projekt came up with the idea of GOG.com-a digital distributor modeled after the success of CDP's earlier brick-and-mortar model. It was a huge success for CD Projekt, not only garnering the respect and business of a number of new gamers, but helping them seal deals with publishers worldwide.Ī decade later, with the rise of broadband internet and the increasing expense and competition in the video game industry, both piracy and the use of ever more invasive DRM were on the rise. That series, Rambourg says, was a tipping point for many Polish gamers who decided to give "legal gaming" a try.
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"They introduced a budget series of classic PC games to Polish gamers," says Rambourg, "very often localized into their native language along with the game manual, beefed up with some goodies (stickers, posters, etc), in a nice-looking box, and for a very reasonable price." In order to get gamers to actually buy games rather than pirate them, CD Projekt struck upon a novel idea: make purchasing games convenient and affordable. Hardware was also expensive, so many Polish gamers played older games that would run properly on older machines-older games that they tended to pirate.

"Back in those days," Rambourg tells me, Poland's economy "was rather fragile and piracy was the most popular channel for gamers to get a chance to play their favorite titles from the West." System Shock 2 came to the site around the same time as Ken Levine's BioShock Infinite was launched, just so we could all compare Levine's newer game with his classic.Ī Brief History of CD Projekt and GOG.comįounded by Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski, CD Projekt started out as a retail game distributor in Poland in the 1990's, not long after the fall of the Berlin wall. I've even found more obscure titles like Blade of Darkness, a game every fan of Dark Souls should play to learn where that game drew its inspiration for combat. Icewind Dale, Wizardry, Ultima.the list goes on and on. Here, they've been remastered to work with modern operating systems.
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You can find all sorts of games you might have played in the good old days-my beloved old Might & Magic games, for instance, which I own still but only on floppy discs for a long forgotten Mac operating system. The site is more than just a place to slake your nostalgia, though for anyone who played PC games back in the 80's and 90's it will certainly do just that with its catalog of classic titles.
