GOG.com shut down | Hacker News Reader

GOG.com shut down

gog.com

60 pointspsadauskas28 comments

GOG.com was a site where you could purchase and download old games. They fixed them to work on modern Windows, and were DRM-free.

The front page is loading slowly, here's all thats up there now:

Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We're very grateful for all support we've received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

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.

On a technical note, this week we'll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best, GOG.com Team

And their latest Twitter update: http://twitter.com/GOGcom/status/24772660481

Their Twitter feed is an interesting read. Lots of updates, new games added in the last week, a sale announced yesterday, the complaint you linked to, then the site is pulled 13 minutes later. Whatever happened, it happened quickly.

Coincidence that they were distributing Codemaster games and then shutdown? As avid http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ fans know, Codemaster have always been very careful about protecting their copyrights. None of the Dizzy games are available, for example, despite being 20+ years old and without a new release in almost as long.

I bought Fallout from them - I really hope they find a way for me to download it one more time, I really liked that game.

The owners, CD Projekt, may have been bought out[1][2]. Supposedly, it's likely to be announced around September 22.

In general, I encourage people to check out the relevant Quarter to Three thread, as that's where all the game developers tend to hang out (GOG.com's Tom Ohle just to mention one):

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=613....

On another note, this is so friggin' weird and impetuous.

[1]: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=23853...

[2]: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=23853...

Reading the Qt3 forums, this seems more like an abrupt PR stunt.

“I think GoG.com marketing just rolled a critical fumble.” - Tom Ohle

Yep. At this point, I'm not assuming anything. I'll just wait it out to see what gets announced.

This would be the most stupid PR move ever. "Hey guys, let's bring the entire site down to get some buzz." No, I don't think I'm buying that.

The Julian Assange maneuver does unfortunately appear to work.

What the heck?

I've bought more than 25 games on GOG and I was just thinking about buying a new one (Still life) today - were there really so few people buying the games? Were the prices too low?

I hope I can still buy some of the games on my wish list - I would have already bought even more if only I had the time to actually play all these games. (I've played about half of them to date.)

I'm sorely disappointed by their sudden decision and complete removal of all access to the page. This could have been handled more professionally - why not announce closure a month in advance so people actually had the time to download everything and buy games they still would have wanted to buy?

Well, felt good to vent about it. Now to find an internet connection faster than 80kb/s to download some gigabytes of games. :-(

This surprises me. Although it may not have been doing as well as they hoped, I'd be stunned if it couldn't be profitable on a skeleton crew - probably one part time guy doing support, and someone doing the accounting once a month. It's a reasonably well known portal, after all. There's probably something else going on, legal trouble or founder dispute or the like.

This reminds me of when iVideoSongs stopped updating. They had very high quality tutorial videos, and I've basically learned to play guitar from them. Having purchased 6 or 8 of the videos after the site was abandoned, I'm pretty happy they didn't just pull the plug like this. How anyone prefers to spend hours of their life learning a song to a crappy youtube video to save a few bucks is beyond me.

From the tweet, it sounds like they were fighting with publishers to keep things DRM-free. Still doesn't explain why the entire site was shut down, though.

A Cease & Desist would be a pretty good explanation. Part of that process is showing that you respected the owners' rights, etc. Taking down the whole site if just one publisher went after them is unlikely.. seems like there's something much bigger here.

Maybe a few publishers all attacking at the same time? Getting buried in legal isn't fun.. Or maybe not enough revenue? Or maybe a buyout or...? No inside info here.

I don't see how a C&D could possibly achieve this unless GOG was too broke to afford any legal representation at all. Even the scariest C&D letter from a single publisher shouldn't be enough to suspend GOG's agreements with other publishers, and for all the publishers to collude to shut down GOG wouldn't make much sense (why did they make agreements with GOG in the first place?), and ought to run afoul of antitrust laws anyways.

Oohf, I've bought quite a lot of stuff from them, thankfully I have everything mirrored locally. Really nice site, really well packaged games, excellent support, I really liked them.

I was wondering however whether they were going to be sustainable with Steam increasingly offering a back-catalogue of games that were increasingly similar in age and there being only so many really old games worth buying.

They genuinely seemed to try and fight the good fight but I got the impression they had a hell of a time with studios. I contacted them a while back about offering packaged versions of older games they were offering via Dosbox on Linux & Mac as well and it seemed they couldn't due to licensing issues which seems insane given those platforms didn't even exist when those games were made!

That's really amazing. I don't understand why they would do this, since by all counts it was hugely popular and respected among gamers.

So, does DRM translate to more sales?

Here's the thing - if all publishers cared about was their bottom line, then DRM must absolutely translate to more sales, in this context and in big triple A title games.

Or is it that publishing execs aren't willing to take a risk on trying a DRM free model, even though their revenues would hold/increase?

The funny thing is that nobody will benefit from that. The site is down, so honest people who were willing to spend a few bucks on their favorite games will now have to look for them on The Pirate Bay.

...Or buy them used on Amazon or Ebay, just to name two places. I've never bought this false dichotomy for justifying piracy.

Game publishers consider used sales the same as piracy.

Really? And they haven't sued Gamestop yet?

Used games chaps the industries hide http://www.neowin.net/news/used-games-worse-than-piracy-says...

Also developers are now including 1 time activiation codes where you say end up reselling it the new user will have to reactivate it for some all of all of the features, for a fee.

http://360.kombo.com/article.php?artid=18941

Isn't the point of the site that most of these games are difficult to get any other way (ie, even from Amazon & eBay)?

When a game is that old, and difficult to get hold of, I think eventually it is no longer 'piracy', and instead becomes 'preserving our history/culture'.

New games are more and more locked in ways that make selling/buying used copies impossible.

I wish sites that are going down would give a little more detail as to why instead of hand-waving about how things didn't work out but we all had a great experience and learned a lot.

According to Polish news

http://polygamia.pl/Polygamia/1,107162,8397342,GOG_sie_zamyk...

http://www.bankier.pl/forum/temat_re-info-od-cdp-male-podsum...

Michał Kiciński (one of the owners of CD Projekt) suggests: don't panic after info we publish on gog.com

Really sad :-( One of the few internet sites I spent money on.

Oh foo! I kept putting off buying some of my favourites because I was too busy and didn't want to get distracted.

Wow.

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