GOG's Rambourg: DRM Is Terrible, Sales Are Problematic

[Karloff]

GOG's Rambourg: DRM Is Terrible, Sales Are Problematic

Maybe GOG will hold a 150% anti-sale.

GOG's entire policy can be summed up as offering good, DRM-free product at a reasonable price, and so far it's working fine, says GOG's MD Guillaume Rambourg. Trusting the customer isn't something that the industry is used to doing, but "trusting and respecting our gamers who are part of GOG.com remains at the core of how we approach our customers."

DRM just doesn't work, and is terrible as a concept; resistance from gamers is stronger than ever before, but GOG isn't worried that its fans will exploit its DRM free system. GOG customers tend to download a game only once, and when GOG launched a 30-day money back guarantee program, customer support queries only increased by a modest amount.

This, thinks Rambourg, is proof that GOG's customers aren't scamming the system. If they were, GOG would see multiple downloads per account, and have been overwhelmed by money back demands from chiselers looking to score a free game.

"Today gamers worldwide are not only paying our wages, they also helped us get Activision, Ubisoft, Atari, Square-Enix, and even Electronic Arts on-board," says Rambourg. "All in all, after slightly more than five years of existence, we've got more than 570 DRM-free classic titles for PC and Mac, and we've become the number one source for classic content revenue."

The bigger problem is sales. Rambourg acknowledges that discounts have their uses, and that companies have to adapt to the market to survive. Yet at the same time he's a little worried that gamers are beginning to believe "their hobby is worth roughly the same as an iPhone app." That's bound to hurt the industry in the long run, as gamers start refusing to pay full price in the expectation of a sale discount.

It's getting to the point, he jokes, where GOG might just run an anti-sale, "where, for a day, our entire catalog will be priced at 150 percent of original price with a big message splattered across our main page: PLAY THE ONES YOU OWN!"

Source: Ars Technica [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/12/gogs-managing-director-gamer-resistance-to-drm-is-stronger-than-ever/]


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[Colt47]

I think the dirty secret behind the need for sales is the fact that 90% of the games are practically the same game with different skins or are just not that good. There's only so many times someone can play action RPGs before they start feeling like they are playing a previous action RPG with a mod on top, and it's the same situation with shooters and other games. There are mods that are change games enough to make them worthy of being a different game and those are the exception rather than the rule. (There were quite a few good modders back in the days of Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament.)

Kind of reminded of that one episode of Star Trek that went over the life of the Q. It's like you end up eventually having done everything and all that's left is reviewing old news.

 

[ClockworkUniverse]

But you will fine near GoG's entire catalog up on torrent sites. So yah, check your metrics Ram. Now as much as I like the idea of DRM free it's not unlike the idea of communism. IT works great in theory... but in practice it's not that great. It's why most of the games on GoG are old games that the license holders don't really care about because (trhing is 10 years old?? We already wrote that off the books.) or and more importantly, indies for whom exposure is just as important as revenue.

Yeah, people do pirate DRM-free games. Just like they pirate games with DRM, because DRM doesn't work.

Consider, then, that of the options of adding DRM to a game and not adding DRM to a game, the one that actually requires doing something clearly costs more money.

So, (ignoring the one exception of Steam as a form of DRM that increases the market size), given the options of spending money to accomplish nothing, and not spending money to accomplish nothing, I'm not sure how the latter is that bad of an idea.

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

I think the dirty secret behind the need for sales is the fact that 90% of the games are practically the same game with different skins or are just not that good.

Wow, I couldn't have said it better myself. All in all, I think sales DO cause me to buy less just-released games, but for every one 'new' re-skin that I could have momentarily enjoyed I find two or three hidden gems that are so much more enjoyable which I would not have been able to afford otherwise. Since I'm buying digital almost all that money goes to the studios and not a retailer, so I'd say that the amount of money I've put into the system hasn't increased or decreased, just gone to people who make better games.

Also, to counter the idea that dirt cheap games make the hobby "worth less" mentally, I'd argue that paying $10-20 for more unique and memorable experiences instead of $60 for every Gun-Dude-Bro-of-Dutyost-Apocolyptic-Warfare clone gives the medium a great chance to prove that it doesn't need the AAA titans to survive. Perhaps it is even heralding an end of an era, where so many AAA studios have outright failed because customers have stopped paying for so many of those games. I mean, having terrible budgeting skills certainly doesn't help there, but budgeting doesn't really matter when no one wants to buy it in the first place.

 

[Dr.Awkward]

Look, it's time to admit that $5.99 and $9.99 aren't the kind of prices people want to pay for games so old despite how good they are. I hate to say this, but did GOG ever consider that people might be more interested in buying the old games if they were $2.99 and $4.99 instead?

 

[Falterfire]

But you will fine near GoG's entire catalog up on torrent sites. So yah, check your metrics Ram. Now as much as I like the idea of DRM free it's not unlike the idea of communism. IT works great in theory... but in practice it's not that great. It's why most of the games on GoG are old games that the license holders don't really care about because (trhing is 10 years old?? We already wrote that off the books.) or and more importantly, indies for whom exposure is just as important as revenue.

Yeah, GoG's entire catalog is on PirateBay. Which is totally the opposite of games with DRM, because you can't find Black Flag or Need For Speed Rivals or Call of Duty Ghosts on PirateBay because their DRM was so incredibly effective.

Uhm... if your target audience will only pay a discounted price it may be a sign that you were over-charging. Gamers will pay full price but understand that like any other groups, gamers are being hit by the global economic problems just as badly. When the price of your product is the barrier to ownership then one must find a way to reduce the price of said product.

I agree here though. $60 is a lot of money, especially with the number of active publishers and developers. There are enough good games released now that you can't just set a high price and expect consumers to meet you unless you're sitting on something you know they really want. Even if I'm interested in a $60 game, it's not like I'm going to run out of games to play before it goes on sale.

I sense a touch of bitterness. I wonder if he's a little perturbed that he can't beat steam on sales., which is legit, steam sales pretty much define the market now. Though my own answer would be, to stop trying twitchy gimmicks. i mean that Autumn insomnia sale was literally a joke and I honestly wonder how many users were turned off by it since the sale was not design for their convenience but for GoG to trying and turn shopping into skinner-box.

Oh god that Insomnia sale. What a freaking mess. I appreciate the attempts to do something new with sales to keep them interesting, but that was not the way to do it. Other companies are beating Steam on prices though - Both Amazon and Green Man Gaming have managed to match or beat Steam's prices on quite a few games over the course of December, especially with GMG having a constant 20% off everything with the right coupon (A coupon which stacks with deals).

 

[Laurents van Cauwenberghe]

Oh where to begin.



But you will fine near GoG's entire catalog up on torrent sites. So yah, check your metrics Ram. Now as much as I like the idea of DRM free it's not unlike the idea of communism. IT works great in theory... but in practice it's not that great. It's why most of the games on GoG are old games that the license holders don't really care about because (trhing is 10 years old?? We already wrote that off the books.) or and more importantly, indies for whom exposure is just as important as revenue.

mate, almost every game that has DRM was cracked a couple of days after its release (with the exception of always online DRM, which in all honesty worked great. I mean, look at diablo 3 and simcity... oh wait) DRM or not, a game will get cracked, after it's cracked, the DRM is only there to annoy THE LEGITIMATE CUSTOMERS.
I prefer the way cd projekt red did it, but DRM on the game for a week and then disable it because it was cracked anyway.

 

[Skeleon]

I absolutely love their philosophy and I support them not unextensively with my business, I'd say.
As for the sales, well... the jinn is kind of out of the bottle already. Players expect sales. Even more importantly, people generally only pay full-price to get to play right now, which happens very rarely with classics and much more so with new titles. So as GOG expands its catalogue more and more on new titles (which they are already doing with select releases), I suppose they can more and more count on people buying without big discounts. But to expect similar on the majority of the rather old catalogue they sport is unrealistic.

 

[Colt47]

I think the dirty secret behind the need for sales is the fact that 90% of the games are practically the same game with different skins or are just not that good.

Wow, I couldn't have said it better myself. All in all, I think sales DO cause me to buy less just-released games, but for every one 'new' re-skin that I could have momentarily enjoyed I find two or three hidden gems that are so much more enjoyable which I would not have been able to afford otherwise. Since I'm buying digital almost all that money goes to the studios and not a retailer, so I'd say that the amount of money I've put into the system hasn't increased or decreased, just gone to people who make better games.

Also, to counter the idea that dirt cheap games make the hobby "worth less" mentally, I'd argue that paying $10-20 for more unique and memorable experiences instead of $60 for every Gun-Dude-Bro-of-Dutyost-Apocolyptic-Warfare clone gives the medium a great chance to prove that it doesn't need the AAA titans to survive. Perhaps it is even heralding an end of an era, where so many AAA studios have outright failed because customers have stopped paying for so many of those games. I mean, having terrible budgeting skills certainly doesn't help there, but budgeting doesn't really matter when no one wants to buy it in the first place.

Yeah, I can't tell you how many times it feels like I was tricked into buying the latest version of Monopoly by some random over hyping AAA publisher. Dragon Age II was probably the worst offender, but Metro Last Light and Bioshock Infinite are also up there in the top numbers. I'd complain about CoD or Battlefield, but those games pretty much tell the person buying "you're here to buy a military shooter and you get a military shooter". Bioshock Infinite ads seem to harp on about it's gameplay and setting, then you play it and realize it's the same as playing a mod of Unreal Tournament. Metro: Last Light had good ideas nested in it, just that it wastes the setting and creative weapons by limiting itself to a linear story. Also it has invisible walls everywhere.

 

[Comocat]

Oh where to begin.

...

I think you pretty much nailed it. I used GoG for the first time ever and AFAIK, it seems to be a company built entirely around monetizing abandonware. I bought Master of Magic (MoM) for $2 USD and Roller Coaster Tycoon for $3, it's not like GoG took much of a risk selling MoM which came out in 1994.

It's a handy service for finding classics, but his arguments ring kind of hollow when GoG really only sells stuff only enthusiasts care about. I was browsing the web for MoM strategies, and the first several hits are for free, seemingly legal, copies of the game. Why would anyone pirate MoM when they can get it for free?

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

Yeah, I can't tell you how many times it feels like I was tricked into buying the latest version of Monopoly by some random over hyping AAA publisher. Dragon Age II was probably the worst offender, but Metro Last Light and Bioshock Infinite are also up there in the top numbers. I'd complain about CoD or Battlefield, but those games pretty much tell the person buying "you're here to buy a military shooter and you get a military shooter". Bioshock Infinite ads seem to harp on about it's gameplay and setting, then you play it and realize it's the same as playing a mod of Unreal Tournament. Metro: Last Light had good ideas nested in it, just that it wastes the setting and creative weapons by limiting itself to a linear story. Also it has invisible walls everywhere.

I'm about ready to write off the entire FPS genre. It's just so over-done these days. EVERYTHING has to be an FPS now, even action and platform games feel the need, but the camera angle is detrimental to that gameplay style. One of the worst parts about it I've noticed is that there's a LARGE portion of people that simply can't do FPS. It may be largely due to low frame rates combined with extremely narrow field of view, but try getting anyone new to games to play an FPS... in my exerience they universally get turned around, disoriented, or just strait up nauseous. I really miss being able to play 3rd person games, and even those that exist now are almost all shooters. I wish all those jokes were true about Naughty Dog revisiting Crash Bandicoot with the next gen Uncharted engine ^.^

 

[Colt47]

Oh where to begin.

...

I think you pretty much nailed it. I used GoG for the first time ever and AFAIK, it seems to be a company built entirely around monetizing abandonware. I bought Master of Magic (MoM) for $2 USD and Roller Coaster Tycoon for $3, it's not like GoG took much of a risk selling MoM which came out in 1994.

It's a handy service for finding classics, but his arguments ring kind of hollow when GoG really only sells stuff only enthusiasts care about. I was browsing the web for MoM strategies, and the first several hits are for free, seemingly legal, copies of the game. Why would anyone pirate MoM when they can get it for free?

I'd say about 90% of the GoG library holds up as well as a card castle. There are probably a blessed few games on there that would even keep a current generation audience interested. It's an interesting place to look through for historic reasons though, as you can see the isometric RPG craze of the late 90s through early 00s there.

 

[VaporWare]

Part of the issue with games being perceived as worth the price of an iPhone app is that the market has gotten to be about that saturated. Competition for the player dollar has never been fiercer, and one of the only consistent ways to get people to send their dollar your way is to provide a superior product at a lower price point. Flashy ads, big names and bigger promises will only take you so far, especially once people have been burned as consistently and dramatically as we have in recent years.

We live in a world where people are, with a straight face, charging AAA prices for shovelware grade products while others charge iPhone app prices for AAA grade material. It should come as no surprise at all to anyone with the slightest amount of economic awareness that in such an environment prices paid are going trend downwards as the people paying seek the best bang for their buck.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

He's not wrong with the sales thing, but even so, they can't expect 10 million people to all buy brand new games at maximum price all the time.

 

[VaporWare]

Now, things have changed , and granted most DRM is inconvenient but what else would you have them do... people will pirate it and worse people will pirate and then turn around and sell their pirated copies... don't laugh, that was a biig thing in my country for a while, it was at one point the 2/3rds of all Windows machines were running pirated versions, it was worse for games. Again, remember, piracy basically hurts the devs more than the publishers. One's stance on DRM changes depending on whether one has actually produced a game... so really, let me hear from Any of you that have actually deved a game that has or was on the market...am I right?


DRM can however be a force for good, look at steam for example. it's drm...and better still it's drm that provides a benefit to all parties. Steam makes the installation eay and finding support much faster, it provides a means for indies to get their titles listed in a major distributor (Greenlight) and it provides devs and publishers a means of reasonably securing their product from theft. That's not to mention the sales.

If people weren't dicks...we could live ina DRM free world... sadly.. this is not the case.

The problem is that most DRM is a train-wreck that results in piracy being the most convenient means of getting a game /even if you bought it boxed/. Most people don't even think of Steam as DRM because it doesn't actively impede your attempts to play or violently compromise the integrity of your system by assuming you're a pirate the way things like SecuROM do.

The pathology of third party DRM software is that it causes the development and maintenance costs of a game to rise staggeringly and actively costs sales while inflating the apparent piracy rate as legitimate customers go digging up cracks so they can play what they paid for when the DRM spins out and explodes.

Lock the gate to the amusement park against trespassers, by all means. But don't ask me to sit in Room 101 for a day before I can get on the ride when I'm already holding a ticket.

 

[fix-the-spade]

But you will fine near GoG's entire catalog up on torrent sites.

You will find pretty much every game, for every platform in history on torrents if you know where and what to look for. GOG's DRM free catalogue is sitting there alongside everything Valve has made in the last decade, EA's efforts, Ubisoft too, they all spent a shed load of money to be in the exact same situation as GOG, which makes GOG seem like the smart one to me.

It's interesting the number of Indy titles on GOG, including recent ones, I'd love to know the exact sales numbers and income they generate versus STEAM/Origin and co. I'd love to know what effect systems like Origin have on average price paid as well.

 

[Something Amyss]

I think the dirty secret behind the need for sales is the fact that 90% of the games are practically the same game with different skins or are just not that good.

I think it's more than just that. There are games of dubious quality/retreads, but also games that are incredibly short, and games that sell off parts as DLC. And honestly, that trust thing comes up. I don't trust the gaming industry. I don't think many really do.

So if you know games go on sale, why not wait? Less investment on an uncertain product is surely a good thing, right?

And I don't know if it's hurting the industry, but I also don't care. If they want me to buy things at full price, they need better business practices that make me think the end game will be worth it.

You can't stop a determined thief, you can only test his determination. That is a quote of wisodm.

It's also relatively unimportant within this context. The "thieves" have passed pretty much every test because DRM isn't a reliable deterrent. Most DRM is cracked quickly, and since it's most useful early on, that's a huge issue.

Consumer testers used to define locks in terms of how long it would take to get through them. The recommendation was for a lock that would deter an intruder for 60 seconds, because after that they were unlikely to continue. The people making this recommendation were aware you can't stop someone truly determined, but you could make a calculated attempt to thwart them.

The problem being there's no real analogue to the 60 second lock in terms of DRM. One could argue that deterring the less serious pirates would be an equivalent, but master thieve don't install backdoors so you can break into a house and even a busted lock will be rapidly replaced. And in an earlier era this may have been enough, but it seems everyone knows how to get stuff on the internet these days.

 

[ClockworkUniverse]

This.. is true, but the same case could be made thusly. Thousands of homes with locked doors are broken into every year... does than mean it makes no sense to stop locking your door at all? Thousands of cars with alarms are stolen every year... does that mean you don't put an alarm on your car?

Sure, but those things don't work remotely similarly.

With locks, each lock must be opened individually. A lock can be opened, but that's no big deal in the grand scheme of things because thieves have to take the time to open each lock they want to open, which means that locks are effective as a deterrent.

To make the metaphor fit DRM, imagine if a company released a model of lock where if someone picked any one of the hundreds of thousands of locks produced, the others would just suddenly evaporate. There really would just be no point in buying one of those locks. That's how DRM works. One guy cracks it, and then he puts up a version of the product without the DRM.

And that's not even factoring in the issue of inconveniencing the legitimate consumer with hoops the pirate doesn't have to jump through.

 

[Laurents van Cauwenberghe]

Oh where to begin.



But you will fine near GoG's entire catalog up on torrent sites. So yah, check your metrics Ram. Now as much as I like the idea of DRM free it's not unlike the idea of communism. IT works great in theory... but in practice it's not that great. It's why most of the games on GoG are old games that the license holders don't really care about because (trhing is 10 years old?? We already wrote that off the books.) or and more importantly, indies for whom exposure is just as important as revenue.

mate, almost every game that has DRM was cracked a couple of days after its release (with the exception of always online DRM, which in all honesty worked great. I mean, look at diablo 3 and simcity... oh wait) DRM or not, a game will get cracked, after it's cracked, the DRM is only there to annoy THE LEGITIMATE CUSTOMERS.
I prefer the way cd projekt red did it, but DRM on the game for a week and then disable it because it was cracked anyway.

This.. is true, but the same case could be made thusly. Thousands of homes with locked doors are broken into every year... does than mean it makes no sense to stop locking your door at all? Thousands of cars with alarms are stolen every year... does that mean you don't put an alarm on your car?

You see you have to do something to protect one's property, games have always had some form of DRM really. It's just for a good while the media itself was the DRM, before burners came standard it was not practically to pirate a game that came on a CD... the next media down was flopy disks and sure there were harddrives butr back then a 500meg hd was not cheap... so having even a 100 megs just sitting on your pc was not a fun idea...

Check back to earlier games you find many of them required passwords from the manuals, now again, back then it was an effective barrier since scanners were not standard home equipment back then. These are all early examples of DRM people. Also back then even if it was pirated there was a limit to how far one person could spread and distribute. This was also the era where most gamers were into consoles anyway so yeah again, smaller market.

Now, things have changed , and granted most DRM is inconvenient but what else would you have them do... people will pirate it and worse people will pirate and then turn around and sell their pirated copies... don't laugh, that was a biig thing in my country for a while, it was at one point the 2/3rds of all Windows machines were running pirated versions, it was worse for games. Again, remember, piracy basically hurts the devs more than the publishers. One's stance on DRM changes depending on whether one has actually produced a game... so really, let me hear from Any of you that have actually deved a game that has or was on the market...am I right?


DRM can however be a force for good, look at steam for example. it's drm...and better still it's drm that provides a benefit to all parties. Steam makes the installation eay and finding support much faster, it provides a means for indies to get their titles listed in a major distributor (Greenlight) and it provides devs and publishers a means of reasonably securing their product from theft. That's not to mention the sales.

If people weren't dicks...we could live ina DRM free world... sadly.. this is not the case.

you can't really compare piracy to breaking & entering or car theft.
for one, you can't really break into a house if there are still people around. there's also the chance that you get caught in the act. if you crack a game and upload it on the piratebay, there is 0 repercussion for you since you can't be tracked (even if they do so, the piratebay will get all the flack).

yes games have always had a form of DRM (usually in the form of serial codes) but that didn't really bother the customer so much since he just needed to type in a code once and that's it. Although i do remember an annoying form of DRM for an old game called Pool of Radiance (old MS dos rpg). With the game came this code wheel, the game would give you a symbol and you were then asked to find this symbol on the code wheel and type in the word that is underneath it, if you got it wrong, the game would crash.

I would totally support the idea of DRM if it would actually work, but the games are imediatly cracked and then the DRM is just there to fuck over the customer (and no one else!). I'm willing to bet that the difference in sold copies with and without DRM would be almost the same, maybe even more without DRM since a lot of people boycot games with intrusive DRM.

I don't really see how you could call steam a force for good, in all honesty, it's just an online distributor that allows you to play games offline and also because it has a lot of indie games. Also, greenlight is actually awful, amazing games like space pirates vs zombies wasn't allowed on steam for a long time while absolute shit like revelations 2012 gets on steam without needing to go trough greenlight.
I'm not saying that steam is bad but people seem to give it way too much praise.

 

[Oskuro]

The nail has been struck squarely on the head. COmpetition is out there. It's no longer the near oligopoly that we had before. We've reached the point in the video game industry where it's not about bigger and better, it's now about lean and sleek. Devs and publishers are now pressured to keep their costs down, and their product quality high to enable them to turn profit at lower prices..

I think the point of the article is being misunderstood. The current climate, with its fierce discount-based competition, is not about quality vs price, it's about market dominance. Those who own an influential platform use their market dominance to sink the competition by devaluing their products.

As an example, think of what Microsoft has been doing since the Internet became a thing: Offering products for free (Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, etc...) to drive competitors actually selling similar products out of business, thus cementing Microsoft's dominance so they can exploit the Internet as they see fit. No, seriously, they originally intended for the Internet to work like XBox Live, to have users connect to their ISPs via Microsoft-owned software (MSN) which would mean you'd have to pay Microsoft to use the net, and only access content they saw fit.

This is the game being played today, owners of large platforms use their market dominance to increase their market share, and this hurts smaller developers/publishers greatly, as their income is strictly dependent on selling their specific products and can't afford to slash prices.


The reality is that making a game (or anything) costs money. Even if the game is a copy of another game, you still have to pay the wages of all employees, pay costs for hardware, software, electricity bills, etc... The problem with the AAA industry is that their budgets are overblown in their quest for the next big hit, and they certainly could do with toning it down, but for non-AAA developers, quite often the price of the game is what they must charge to survive.


It's very harmful to have full blown games priced the same as crappy mobile apps made for cheap, specially since the marketing strategy of these apps is to promote blind consumerism: Buy them because they are cheap, and quickly discard them and buy a new one.


That's what Rambourg is warning about. People should buy games that they want to play, and play them, rather than buy on a whim and then discard them. That way developers/publishers who put out good games stay afloat, while opportunists who churn out crappy shovelware die out.