guillaume-rambourg
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GOG head: massive discounts 'bad for gamers'
GOG managing director Guillaume Rambourg shared a shockingly controversial opinion: there's a downside to Steam discounts. "Heavy discounts are bad for gamers," Rambourg told Rock, Paper, Shotgun. "If a gamer buys a game he or she doesn't want just because it's on sale, they're being trained to make bad purchases, and they're also learning that games aren't valuable." The all-too-common phenomenon of spending more money than you want to just to get everything that's on sale in a particular week is "not good for anyone," he said.If, like us, you wonder at this point how this attitude squares with GOG's own weekend sales, Rambourg explained: "Our average sale tends to be around 40% – 50% off; that's plenty of incentive to pick up a game if you're interested or if you just think you might like to try it because you're not sure about the game, but not some crazy 75% or 85% discount that damages the long-term value of a game." Of course, if you want to get extremely technical about it, the majority of GOG's business is selling $6 versions of games that cost upward of $50 when they originally came out (twenty years ago).
Report: Good Old Games to offer Good New(ish) Games
During the CD Projekt Red Investor's Day conference in Poland today, GOG managing director Guillaume Rambourg announced an "audacious plan" to bolster the DRM-free retailer with the addition of new games, following the success of The Witcher 2 on the service. "Traditionally, GOG.com has looked for great classics that are three years old or older," he said. "We will continue to add classic games, of course, but we are actively working to sign newer titles now." Rambourg noted that the newer games will cost more than most GOG releases --$13.99 to $16.99, but that the company plans to maintain its DRM-free model. The low prices suggest that these won't be brand new games, but simply games more recent than GOG's current three-year cutoff period. According to a translation of GOG's action plan, the company's goal is to be the number two PC digital distribution platform. It's already the number one platform in our minds, whenever we think about old adventure games. Isn't that enough? Update: GOG officially announced the initiative. Find the press release after the break.
GOG.com's Guillaume Rambourg explains what happened last week
Last week's GOG.com stunt was nothing short of confounding. For reasons (at the time) unknown, Good Old Games shut its virtual doors and offered little information regarding its future, leaving customers to wonder what would happen to their ability to re-download purchased games. This was after a tweet from the company's official account obliquely stated, "Sometimes it's really hard being DRM-free ... hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy." When the site relaunched less than a week later and revealed the hoax for what it was, after days of ... less descriptive explanations as to what was going on, fans and customers were understandably upset. GOG publicly apologized last Wednesday on Twitter, saying, "We really are sorry to those who felt deceived. It was done with the best of intentions, hopefully we can make it up to you." After all that, we asked GOG managing director Guillaume Rambourg what in the world happened. First and foremost, he said that last week's temporary closure of GOG was inevitable for the site's relaunch. "98% of the code of our website was rewritten to be able to welcome more users and deliver a better experience, which required a major change in our backend and as a matter of fact, taking down our platform for a few days," Rambourg explained. He told us that management was faced with two options: make an "official 'boring' statement" or take "a more creative route." As evidenced by the past week, it's pretty clear management chose the latter. And even though the reaction hasn't been 100 percent positive, Rambourg said he'd do the same thing all over again given the chance.
