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GOG Offers PC Gaming Classics
GOG.com promises to deliver classic low-cost DRM-free PC games such as Fallout and MDK to gamers later this year.
The digital storefront GOG.com--or "Good Old Games"--comes from CD Projekt, the house behind the PC RPG, The Witcher.
Games on GOG.com are DRM-free, work on Windows XP and Vista, and cost $5.99 or $9.99. The site itself will offer community features such as forums, user reviews and editorial content.
A closed public beta is slated to begin August 1.
CD Projekt is currently in talks with "several" publishers to get their games on GOG.com. Interplay and Codemasters are two that are already locked in.
Some titles that are confirmed to arrive on the service include Fallout, Freespace 2, Operation Flashpoint and TOCA Race Car Driver 3.
GOG.com managing director Adam Oldakowski said in a statement, "...We’ve started building a great games catalogue, gotten rid of the copy protection that gamers hate so much, optimized the games to work on modern operating systems, and made them cheap enough that piracy seems like a rip-off."
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
We'll see. I'd point to StarROMs as a similar service that never gained traction. They sold DRM-free ROMs for use with MAME and had some high-profile games right out of the gate. The pricing model was odd, but still cheap and reasonable.
They folded after a couple of years.
Don't get me wrong ... I'm all in favor of standalone, untethered copies of games available from a legal source. If we're going to do distribution like this, as opposed to something like Steam or XBLA (which until recently had some oddness when you moved from one machine to another because of DRM funkiness), then I will vote for them with my dollars. I bought probably a dozen or more games from StarROMs on the same principles.
But I want to see sustained additions to the catalog over a year or more before I really believe they'll make a go of it.
GameTap offers some of the same games, too, but there are some obvious differences between this and GameTap (subscription model and the way that they deliver games). Love the GOG idea though, and looking forward to seeing what kind of niche this can carve out.
Looking at this service's marquee titles--Fallout 2, FreeSpace 2, Sacrifice--it's clear that GOG.com has the right idea as to what classic PC games are worth keeping on the market. But it's also important to keep in mind that many of the titles GOG is advertising overlap with games provided by subscription services like GameTap. Those services are likely to be GOG's main competition going forward, and it will be interesting to see how each reacts to the other.