Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlexDanger | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if CD Projekt heard the same arguments when they started GOG? Certainly they leveraged The Witcher and anger around DRM to gain traction. But they've found a sustainable niche that does not depend on going head to head with Steam's colossal network effect.

Steam is generally pretty great. But off the top of my head I can think of two areas where Steam arent delivering;

- Greenlight. Good idea, didnt work as planned. Room in the market for some kind of Greenlight/Kickstarter hybrid?

- Gaming for kids and educational software. A Kahn Academy approach but with games instead of lessons.

View on HN

There’s a fundamental difference in how GOG got started though, and it’s buried in their acronym, which used to stand for “Good Old Games”. They were focused on providing access to classic/retro PC and DOS games, something that Steam didn’t do and much more in the “blue ocean” territory. It’s only later that they started to accept modern games on the service.

Article's author here.

GOG.com got started in 2008, which was critical to their success. Steam had much lower market share back then. If GOG started today I would give them much, much, lower odds of succeeding.

And consider also that Desura, Direct2Drive, Impulse, etc, which also were around in that rough time period, are all dead and gone.

GOG only started selling newer games in 2012, and even then it started only selling a few. Before that, it was a place to buy old games (hence the original name, Good Old Games). I think GOG's success was because for its first few years, it was selling games that simply weren't available on Steam or anywhere else at the time. When it did finally go up against Steam, it already had a decently large customer base, and was able to set itself up well a a DRM-free Steam alternative.

I agree with all of this!

Indeed. First they got a market which was unserved (old games), then they got the CD Project Red games (Witcher series), then they branched into third-party games.

Also, let's not forget another point, is that CD Projekt was already a large distributor/localizer in Poland long before they had their RED division: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt

So they didn't really start out of nothing when it comes to having connections with game developers.

- DRM-free standalone binaries. That was a big draw for me at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com