GOG Fakes Its Death To Promote Relaunch
Good Old Games has built up a tremendous amount of good will from the gaming community in the two years since it launched. Offering classic, out-of-print, DRM-free games tweaked to run on modern computers with extremely reasonable $6-10 price tags was a brilliant way to get nostalgic PC gamers to fall in love with the company. Now, GOG may have piddled most of that good will away due to a spectacularly ill-conceived PR stunt.
GOG.com disappeared Sunday, with the cryptic message, "This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await." As a result, users who didn't make local backups of the games they purchased were effectively locked out for days, and it seemed like they would never get their games back. Earlier, GOG announced that it was all a marketing gimmick to promote the end of its two-year "beta" cycle and the launch of the newest version of its service.
It was a spectacularly ill-conceived and poorly-executed gimmick, and one that may have alienated many of the service's customers. GOG has released a half-hearted mea culpa for the stunt, saying they would like to "apologize everyone who felt deceived or harmed in any way by us closing down GOG.com without any warning and without giving access to your games." All considered, GOG really should have just gone with a press release and a service outage warning for the upgrade.
GOG 2.0 launched Thursday September 23 at 8:00 a.m. EST.
Amanita’s “Pirate Amnesty” sale: Machinarium $5 through August 12
Amanita Design, the developers of the critically acclaimed adventure/puzzle game Machinarium, are holding a "Pirate Amnesty" sale through August 12. For the next few days, the game will be available for just $5, 75% off its previous $20 price. The thought behind this is to pull in some of the people who have already pirated the DRM-free indie game with a great deal. If you've already pirated the game and still don't want to drop $20 on it, you can legitimately purchase it for $5 and be certain that you supported a great indie developer in the process.
People, this is how you deal with piracy. Instead of introducing increasingly draconian measures that barely prevent people from pirating games and either inconveniences or enrages people who legitimately buy your games (I'm looking at you, Activision, EA, and Ubisoft), focus on appealing to gamers' better nature and try to pull pirates toward legitimately buying your game.
Piracy is an unfortunate reality of software. It's impossible to make a game completely pirate-proof, and to claim you have done so is inviting legions of extremely skilled code crackers to prove you wrong. You can lock down more and more features and require constant registration and authentication, but for every pirate you thwart in that manner you piss off at least ten people who actually paid for the game.
Navigation
Recent Posts
- SMBC Covers Internet Policy Better Than Me
- The Humble Bundle is Back Again, and Now For Android
- Happy Quinceanera, Final Fantasy 7
- Panning Silver: The Wrongo Superman (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #114)
- Bronycon: Bronies and Q Hit the Meadowlands This Summer
Recent Comments
- Doubleself on The Top 5 Sandbox Games
- I_TBAG_U87 on Anatomy of the Rage Quit
- Hosting forums on Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Yes, Deadpool Can Shoryuken (And Why This Is Awesome)
- TheShufflingSkeleton on Get a LittleBigPlanet 2 Beta Key Here!
- Brian on Is Sony Screwing Up the PS Vita? Not Yet. Maybe. Sort of.
