{"id":34876,"date":"2018-07-23T21:24:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-23T21:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/322696"},"modified":"2018-07-23T21:24:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-23T21:24:00","slug":"how-piracy-led-to-gog-encouraging-drm-free-releases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/07\/23\/how-piracy-led-to-gog-encouraging-drm-free-releases\/","title":{"rendered":"How piracy led to GOG encouraging DRM-free releases"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I’d say the biggest competitor for CD Projekt\u00a0was the piracy. That was like the biggest thing in Poland. I mean compared to today, back then it was really bad. Rarely anyone bought games.”<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

– \u00a0Managing director of GOG Piotr\u00a0Karwowski\u00a0speaking to Noclip\u00a0about piracy in Poland.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Back when the media market in communist Poland was dominated by piracy, it was nearly impossible for developers to\u00a0publish\u00a0games without the fear of having their work copied\u00a0and packaged\u00a0in a CD case at a criminally low price in open air markets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After the fall of communism in Poland came the rise of capitalism, ushering in a new generation of consumers\u00a0brought up to believe piracy was the norm and official releases were special editions. But that\u00a0knowledge of this consumer behavior, however, would eventually lead to the conception of GOG.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0a recent video interview<\/a>\u00a0with Noclip, the founders of digital distribution platform GOG\u00a0discuss the inception of the company, their business model, and\u00a0their thoughts about beating piracy not with DRM, but by making the cost of video games “worth” the extra money.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Managing director of GOG Piotr\u00a0Karwowski discusses the early days of piracy in Poland, noting that the general public often assumed the illegal copies were legal while the official copies were special edition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The games were expensive, and typically folks would just say why would you spend so much money on a game if you can go the the stadium?”<\/p>\n

He refers to the open-air stadiums that, back in the day, were used for selling all sorts of illegal media– especially video games. It was a hotspot for piracy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“We didn’t know that was actually a pirated thing,” echoes SVP\u00a0of business development and operations at GOG Oleg\u00a0Klapovsky. “We were going to the flea markets, buying the CD-ROMS in the jewel cases thinking that we were buying it straight from the developer or publisher.”<\/p>\n

“There’s no way to fight piracy with DRMs,” Karwowski\u00a0explains. “I don’t think there was any title which was not pirated. At that point I think this kind of anti-DRM, anti-copy protection kind of thing was already part of the DNA of the company.”<\/p>\n

The mindset to win the hearts\u00a0of consumers through content and fair prices as opposed to copyright protection served as the first building block of GOG’s anti-DRM\u00a0business model. It was certainly the starting point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They were\u00a0speaking as part of a longer interview around the history of GOG,\u00a0so be\u00a0sure to watch the entire video over at Noclip.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I’d say the biggest competitor for CD Projekt\u00a0was the piracy. That was like the biggest thing in Poland. I mean compared to today, back then it was really bad. Rarely anyone bought games.” – \u00a0Managing director of GOG Piotr\u00a0Karwowski\u00a0speaking to Noclip\u00a0about piracy in Poland.\u00a0 Back when the media market in communist Poland was dominated by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34877,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}