STUDIO PROFILE
This is the tale of how a small startup company in Poland created a global e-commerce business, rescuing, sometimes fixing, and re-releasing good old PC games online. Discover how Gog.com is preserving retro gaming with a genuine passion for the art and its cultural significance
Buying genuine, boxed copies of computer-games software in post-communist Poland in the late-eighties, throughout the Nineties and into the early Noughties wasn’t easy, and it certainly wasn’t cheap. “The main problem with computers and software back then was that they were very, very expensive,” explains Marcin Paczynski, Gog.com’s senior business developer. “Typically, you would be spending about 30 percent of your monthly salary on buying an original boxed game, so in Poland it was got around by software piracy.” Local flea markets openly sold pirated games on tapes, floppy disks and later on CDROMS, and for many young Polish gamers, they rarely saw a boxed copy and often weren’t even aware that the pirated versions were pirated, with many people thinking that the boxed copies were special editions of the individually bagged CD-ROMS they were buying. “I remember putting the very first bootleg game I bought into our CD-ROM drive at home, and it shattered because of the humidity inside the little plastic bag it came in,” says Maciej Gołebiewski, Gog.com’s VP of publishing and monetisation. Back in the early Nineties, Polish university graduate Marcin Iwinski was keen to try and bring some legitimacy into software distribution in his homeland, and he established a new company to do just that. In the midnineties, Marcin formed CD Projekt with longterm school friend Michał Kicinski, and they managed to persuade US publisher Interplay to let them not only officially release the RPG Baldur’s Gate in Poland, but to reverseengineer the game so they could add localised Polish text and use well-known Polish actors to record digitised speech. The official localised copy cost an extra 50 percent over the cost to buy the pirated version, but not only did the buyer get a game spread across five CDS, but they got a proper box, and all the extra highquality paraphernalia as well. The experience was totally different to what Polish game players were used to. “It was really impressive,
and it changed the mindset of a lot of people in Poland to move from pirated copies to original ones,” says Marcin Paczynski. “The quality of what you got in the box… the manual, the map… it was way better than buying cheap CDS from a flea market.”
That achievement isn’t one to be underestimated. The situation in Poland was incredibly challenging, so shipping those copies and getting them to paying customers was a struggle. “In the early Noughties there was still no strong retail or distribution of games,” explains Maciej. The fact that CD Projekt not only hit its minimal contractual targets for that version of Baldur’s Gate but exceeded them proved that a substantial market was there. Natural progression and a desire to do games development properly led to the acquisition of the Witcher licence, based upon Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s hugely popular fantasy novels, and the formation of CD Projekt Red as a development studio. The Witcher on the PC debuted in 2007, and it was clear that CD Projekt’s future lay in writing games rather than just distributing them. It also gave Michał Kicinski the encouragement and the confidence to pursue his desire to create a subsidiary business that focused on a Drmfree digital distribution model for classic PC games. He wanted it to be simple and not be overly expensive for the end-customer. The experience CD Projekt had distributing genuine boxed games gave the new venture some credibility when it came to persuading companies to go the digital route years later, but it was still not an easy sell. “The success of the first Witcher game also helped, as we had a successful title,” says Marcin Paczynski. “More doors were open to us than before.” Slowly but surely software distribution in Eastern Europe was becoming more mature and more complex, and more Western companies were starting to take notice. However, legitimate digital distribution was almost non-existent. Although Steam had been around for a few years since 2003, it was not yet the digital distribution and publication platform that it is today. Old, classic PC games were only available via the distinctly unofficial so-called Abandonware piracy websites and getting those hacked and pirated games to work required an expertise that was beyond many people at the time. If the new business was going to be successful, it would need to resolve IP rights and countless technical and resourcing issues first. “This was at the point in time when PC games from the Nineties were starting to not work on more modern computers, especially DOS titles,” remembers Maciej. “CD Projekt had some previous retail experience in
Typically, you would be spending about 30 percent of your monthly salary on buying an original boxed game” Marcin Paczynski
Poland with something called Extra Classics, which were older games updated to run on current PCS sold at a good price point, and they sold very well so there was a need, especially on a global level with many older games no longer working.”
That desire to sell digital versions of fully working classic PC games without DRM gave birth to Good Old Games in 2008. The removal of digital rights management was a cornerstone of the venture’s business model, as it wanted the games to be hassle-free for the paying customer, with the on-disk copy protection or protection systems stripped out, as Marcin Paczynski explains. “In reality DRM wasn’t working because the pirated versions removed it anyway, and the only person being given a bad time was the paying consumer, and we wanted them to have the best possible experience.” “It’s fair that the developer expects someone to prove that they bought the game, but not by putting on so many constraints that it is hurting the people who paid,” adds Maciej. Having said that, some DRM techniques are included in virtual form in certain Gog.com releases if it forms part of the gameplaying experience. Creating a digital software distribution platform from scratch was an enormous and very complicated task. As Good Old Games was blazing the trail on its own, there was nobody to partner with as far as the infrastructure was concerned. Piotr Karwowski was tasked with helping to get the project off the ground, and he was part of a team that brainstormed how they were going to achieve Michał Kicinski’s vision. “They were a group of very passionate and very motivated individuals who rented a very small office in Warsaw, and they sat there for a year and created the platform on their own,” reveals Maciej. “The guys who did that at the beginning did an amazing job as there were no major issues on launch. It was done in a simple way, but it was more than enough for what the community needed at the time,” adds Marcin Paczynski. “Now, with the Gog.com Galaxy app, we have more sophisticated ways to update games, including cloud saves, achievements and things like that, so it’s now getting exponentially more complicated and it’s a huge undertaking which is really not easy to do.” Getting the original version of it digital distribution platform up and running was a big and critical achievement, but it was only the first stage. There were two more huge hurdles to overcome before Good Old Games could be launched. The first was finding some IP owners willing to take that step into the unknown with the company. Persuading publishers that the business model they were proposing could work was a challenge taken on by Gog.com’s senior VP of business development and operations, Oleg Klapovskiy. “The existing relationship with Interplay certainly helped, but we had to be very specific about what we were trying to do, explaining what value we were trying to bring to gamers,” says Maciej. “Nobody wanted to be first with the Drm-free and all that. Let’s see how that goes with someone else. Why me?”
The success of the first Witcher game also helped, as we had a successful title” Marcin Paczynski
Getting a publisher on board was obviously a huge step in the right direction, but unfortunately the process was and still is much more complicated than that. “Proving IP ownership these days is a well-oiled machine, because we now have a lot of experience doing that. For much older games, we need to be creative. Making sense of it all where rights are maybe split between different people, and maybe someone has died, and rights are inherited… it can be really complex. In order to get a game released, you need to have three things from the owner,” explains Marcin Paczynski. “They need to own the IP or have an active licence for the IP. They need to own everything that comes in the game, so the code, the builds, assets, music… everything. The third thing they need to have is the worldwide distribution rights, and the older the games are, the blurrier this all gets.” The paper trail that proves ownership of the IP can take years to resolve, as Marcin goes on to admit. “We have some great titles that we still haven’t released. If you see the community wish list on the website, if a game has more
than 300 votes then you can be certain we have worked on trying to get it. Whenever we do the research, we are contacting the people who we think have the rights for some or all of the elements, but it’s up to those people or companies to say, ‘Yes, we have checked and we have those rights,’ and sometimes the rights are all over the place and other times they do their own research, and the results are inconclusive.”
If a company believes it has the rights but can’t conclusively produce the paperwork to prove that its interpretation is correct, then a decision has to be made. “Then it becomes a riskversus-reward situation for them,” continues Marcin Paczynski. “They have to decide whether it’s really worth it. For big companies that are interested in multimillion-dollar deals, pushing through a deal on the very low end of earnings will often take a lot of time. We sometimes have to wait for the stars to align before we can push through and get the deal done.” “Diablo Hellfire is a good example,” interjects Maciej, talking about the unofficial add-on for the isometric ARPG Diablo. “That was a very complicated release to get done. Legacy Of Kain was another. We were ready to release at 3pm, and at 2pm we got an email that said, ‘We’ve got to double-check something with the rights.’ Fast-forward eight or ten years later, and we finally managed to release it!” “We had a number of great games from Square Enix, but for that one game it took eight years before they could confirm they had the rights,” adds Marcin Paczynski. “I think they put in a lot of work at their end to sort that all out.” These days, Good Old Games is known as Gog.com to more accurately reflect the
There are people out there who care about games, and do want to make them last forever” Maciej Gołebiewski
fact that the site now offers more recent indie titles, and some new AAA releases also available alongside the classic PC games. Pricing is also a significant factor in Gog.com’s success story. There are special offers, and various sales throughout the year, based upon genres, developers, publishers, or particular game series. And the company mantra remains the same. “You buy it, install a very simple package and the game just works,” says Marcin Paczynski. “On top of that you are getting the manuals, and everything else that is available for a game. You are getting all of this as well. A collector’s edition experience.”
Collector is a word that crops up a few times when Gog.com describes what it is doing. It’s a trait that many retro gamers will recognise in themselves. Gamers love to collect games as much as playing them. It’s a personality profile that fits many of Gog.com’s customers, which, by the way, is a term not used by Gog.com itself. They aren’t customers, or consumers. They are gamers, pure and simple. “You also get the technical support if you can’t get a game to run, and you also become part of our community online, not only so we can help resolve issues, but the community also helps us to get games released in the best possible way,” adds Marcin Paczynski. “With each release we put out, we want it to be the best possible version available. If we didn’t, our community would be the first to point out that we forgot about this wallpaper that was added to the Swedish edition, or whatever,” he adds, laughing. The longer you talk to the people at GOG. com, the more apparent it becomes that the passion and the drive behind what they do proliferates throughout the company. The games and the wraparound service that GOG. com provides is clearly something that runs through the veins of all who work there. For example, the addition of the Gog.com Galaxy app and including cloud save functionality if an Internet connection is active gives gamers a consistent and transparent experience when playing a Gog.com-sourced game. “There are people out there who care about games, and do want to make them last forever,” says Maciej. “If they believe in the cost involved to preserve games, then they are helping us. We at Gog.com perceive games as a form of art, like a cultural heritage. If someone asks, ‘Why is a game worth preserving?’ we think of it in the same way as someone looking at a painting from a thousand years ago and asking the same thing. If someone cares about it, then it is worth preserving, it is important. Obviously we are running an e-commerce company, but deep down for me, we know there are millions of people who are a tiny bit happier because of what we do.” “Often people say, ‘I grew up with that title,’ and for us that is proof enough that games should be preserved and that lots of people really still care about them in the same way as great movies, great books, great pieces of art,” concludes Marcin Paczynski. Amen to that.