This time, Pig-Min did an e-mail interview with Lukasz Kukawski, who is doing PR & Marketting of GOG.com
GOG.com
is new Download Game Store, which carries Old Good Games only. It could
be another good example & case for Game Market scene, especially
it's made by CD Projekt from Poland.
And this interview is
done at 15th. Oct. 2008, around 2 weeks ago before I update. Something
is changed, as GOG.com started Public Beta - Started new publisher as
Stratedgy First. Please make sure about that, when you read this. :) Korean version of this Interview
GOG.com started Public Beta, and you could subscribe freely.
1.
GOG.com is made by CD Projekt, and CD Projekt is famous for [Witcher].
But we don't know CD Projekt very much, except for [Witcher]. Please
let us know about mother company of GOG.com. And CD Projekt is from
Poland, but we don't know much about Polish gaming scene, game makers /
players / ... etc. . Please let us know about that, too.
CD
Projekt was founded in 1994 and is one of Eastern and Central Europe's
largest game distributors. CD Projekt group includes the publishing and
distribution companies in Poland, Czech, Slovakia and Hungary; the
dedicated Localisation Centre, which is the leading provider of
cross-platform porting, quality assurance and localisation services in
the region; CD Projekt RED, the development branch responsible for the
hit role-playing franchise, The Witcher; Metropolis Software, currently
developing the anticipated multiplatform sci-fi shooter; and GOG.com,
the ultimate online destination for DRM-free classic PC games.
As
for the polish gaming market it's still pretty young, but it's growing
really fast. In the early 90's Poland had a big problem with the
piracy, so the western publishers didn't care about the Polish market.
But thanks to domestic gaming companies like CD Projekt the gaming
business started to evolve and now Poland is one of the fastest growing
market in the Eastern and the Central Europe. The foreign companies see
that and are opening offices here, just to mention this years openings
of Sony Computer Entertainment Polska and UbiSoft Polska.
With
the development of the gaming market, development studios have
appeared. CD Projekt RED's "The Witcher" is definitely one of the most
popular games made by Poles, but there are more and more games made by
Polish development studios. For example, Metropolis Software, the
creators of Gorky 17 (Odium) and The Prince and the Coward, is now
working on a big project which is a multi-platform science-fiction
shooter. And People Can Fly, who made Painkiller, are working on some
projects which should be published by Electronic Arts. We have lots of
able programers, graphic designers and we have great potential.
2.
'Good Old Games' is every gamer's dream, but nobody did it before. They
were around some Abandonware area, or cheese re-issue as Sierra did for
old adventure re-issues. How come to decide starting such a store? And
how about feedbacks from all over the world, including Press &
Gamers?
The reaction of both gamers and gaming media was
incredible. We've announced the service just before E3 and we were
worried if announcing the service so close to the biggest gaming event
in the world won't get omit by the gaming world. We couldn't be more
wrong :). Couple of hours after we've sent the announcement, GOG.com
was all over the PC gaming portals and forums. We've received thousands
of sign ups for the closed beta and decided to change the 2,000 people
closed beta to the Early Access Beta for everyone who have shown the
interest in our project. The whole Early Access Beta is a great
experience for us. Everyone is very helpful, we're getting lots of
positive feedback and lots of additional ideas to make GOG.com even
better.
And it all started from a nostalgic chat of couple of
guys from CD Projekt's management about a year and a half ago. They
were recalling those good old days and the games they used to play back
then and found out that it's almost impossible to buy most of those
classics in retail or on-line. Even if you have your collection of
original old games, they won't run on modern operating systems. That's
how they came up with the idea of games-on-demand platform with classic
PC games, sold dirt cheap, without DRM and compatible with Windows XP
and Windows Vista.
3.
GOG.com games are cheap. Some are 9.99$, but most of them are 5.99$
only. Cheap price is good, but can you make the profit from such a low
price? Your games are not so light-weighted to download, over 2-300 MB
usually. Traffic might cost money seriously, and even Casual Game
download sites are very sensitive to traffic. Can you really make the
profit from that price, even if it needs several hundred megabytes of
each games to be downloaded?
The
price points were set after a detailed research of digital distribution
market. Those two price points seems to be the best for gamers,
publishers and for us. Even if we are, hopefully, considered as
user-friendly service, we're not doing it for free. At the end of the
day it's all about money. We are aware of the costs of traffic, but
we're considering it more as an 'Investment' than a 'Cost'.
Retro
gaming has great potential and we believe that offering good, classic
games for low price, without DRM, optimized to run on modern OS and
with cool additional stuff is something gamers are missing and will
take advantage of. The Early Access Beta showed us we're heading the
right way and as soon as we'll launch the site to the public and get
more deals signed we can count on big interest and hopefully big sales.
4.
You dealed with Codemasters & Interplay. [Witcher] was distributed
through Atari, so we could understand if you dealed with Atari, but...
Codemasters & Interplay? How come to deal with them? And for
Interplay, do they still have copyrights for older games? We heard that
[Fallout] copyright was sold to Bethesda.
Interplay
and Codemasters were the first couple of publishers we approached.
Their reaction to our offer was pretty fast and that's how we've
managed to sign the deals.
As for the copyrights for Fallout,
Bethesda is the owner of the Fallout IP, but Interplay has the rights
to sell the classic Fallout games so everything is legal :).
5.
[Fallout] question. It's really good chance for you to sell [Fallout] 1
& 2, because many gamers are hyped by upcoming [Fallout 3]. But
does it really effect GOG.com marketting, and are gamers really happy
with that? Are they really best sellers, or some other games are
selling much better?
The hype
around the Fallout 3 is not a problem for us :). The upcoming premiere
of Fallout 3 and all the hype around it is motivating younger audience,
which haven't played the first Fallouts, to check what's all the fuss
about this series. As for the gamers who already know and played the
Fallout games, they were just excited about getting the games without
DRM and for such low price, no matter the hype around Fallout 3.
The
Fallout games are our top sellers, but as we're still in the Early
Access Beta we can't really say if it's going to be remain the same
after we'll open the service to the public. Right now most of our users
are older gamers who know and recognize the Fallout series, but maybe
after the service's opening some other games will become the
best-sellers.
6. All
GOG.com games are Windows XP - Vista compatible. It might need some
additional tech work, maybe not so easy. For example, Gamersgate sells
older game [Majesty Gold Edition], kinda compatible but not so perfect.
So we might guess it's not so easy work, to make older games compatible
with XP / Vista. How do you proceed that process? And How long does it
take for each game, to make it compatible with XP / Vista?
I
must say it takes a little magic from our programming team to make the
old games work. Our programmers search for any incompatibilities which
may occur and bypass them with their great talent and little
programming tricks that us ordinary people wouldn't understand.
Of
course the whole process of optimizing the games to work on modern OS
depends on the game, but generally it takes several weeks to finalize
it.
7. Will GOG.com
restrict sales regarding to Region, or always worldwide available? For
example, [GTA] series are only available in USA from Steam /
Direct2Drive. Region Strict is another wave of Download Purchase, and
wish to know if GOG.com is free from that or not.
Right
now all games offered in our catalogue are available worldwide and
we'll do everything we can to sign future deals to remain so. It's
tough as some games have different rights owners on different
territories. Getting the worldwide licenses takes a lot of time and is
very complex, so there's a possibility we'll have games available only
in some regions. But like I said we'll do everything we can to offer
all games without any region restrictions.
8.
Until now, GOG.com doesn't have so many games, but you might update
more & more in the future. What games are the next, and how often
you will update games? And besides Codemasters & Interplay, there
might be more distributors. What company will be the next you will deal?
Of
course we will add more games with time. Right now we're concentrating
on signing new deals and getting as many Good Old Games as possible. We
believe that when we launch the service and show other publishers great
interest in GOG.com from the gamers and big sales it'll be easier to
convince them to sell their back catalogue classics via GOG.com.
We are finalizing couple of deals right now so you can count on official announcement from us in the nearest future.
9.
Your community service has 'Wish List' feature, and [System Shock]
series are top. Is it just 'Wish List', or will it effect very high for
your business way? Can you really sell top list of your wish lists, as
[System Shock] series - [Monkey Island] series? If you'd really sell
them, it will be real big news in gaming scene.
We've
made the wishlist because our goal is to sell via GOG.com the classics
which gamers want to play again. We can't promise you anything, but we
will do everything we can to get them.
Like I said before,
first we need to launch the site to the public and then hopefully we'll
be able to show the publishers like Electronic Arts or LucasArts
astronomical sales and huge interest from gaming media and gamers which
should convince them GOG.com is the best place to sell those great
classics.
10. Please recommend 5 Good games & the reason why.
These are my personal types so please don't treat it like official GOG.com statement :).
My 5 most favourite Good Old Games would be:
Sam & Max: Hit the road - the game is hilarious and in my opinion Max is one of the best game characters ever created :)
Maniac Mansion - I played it on Commodore 64 and it was one of my first point'n'click adventure game.
Secret of Monkey Island series - these games doesn't need recommendation :)
The Settlers -
one of those games that never get bored. If you start playing it, you
just can't stop, you want to build another house, another mine, another
windmill, etc., etc.
Syndicate - the dark and brutal science-fiction climate makes this game so enjoying even nowadays.
I could go on, but it would be boring.
11. Did you try some Korean games, or even heard or experienced about them? If so, please share your thoughts about that.
For
me the Korean gaming market associates with MMO games. I know NCsoft
and played some of their games like "Guild Wars", "City of Heroes" and
"City of Villains". I also know that cyber sport is really popular in
Korea and you have lots of talented professional players.
12. Please leave some message for Pig-Min readers.
Thank
you very much for giving us the opportunity of introducing our project
to the Korean audience. We hope you like our initiative and you'll find
at GOG.com the games that will bring back memories form the past. As
soon as GOG.com will launch to the public, which will happen very soon,
we'll inform Pig-Min editors, so be sure to check for more news on our
service.