[This interview took place before Marcin Iwinski resigned from his position at CD Projekt.]
It’s been almost three weeks since retro game retailer GOG.com mysteriously “shut down”, leaving many miffed customers to wonder how they would be able to download the titles they had purchased from the site. After days of speculation and cryptic messages from GOG management, the truth was revealed, and in a most unusual way. Dressed as monks, CD Projekt and GOG.com co-founder Marcin Iwinski and managing director Guillaume Rambourg held an online press conference where they begged for forgiveness and revealed the truth: the site wasn’t dead, it was merely relaunching. In order to cope with increased traffic demands, the site’s code had to be re-written practically from the ground up – 98 percent of it to be exact. And when the team realized that this meant taking the site down for a couple of days, the idea to have a little fun with the official announcement and relaunch was born…
GameZone: You caused quite a stir a few weeks ago. How did the idea of using the site’s relaunch to play a practical joke on gamers come about?
Marcin Iwinski: I can’t disagree that there was a lot of discussion around the web about GOG.com. However, I want to stress, we did not intend to play any jokes on anybody. In order to launch the new GOG.com, we had to take down the “old” version, and the whole operation was estimated to take around three days. That’s when the idea of playing a bit of a game came to our minds and instead of a standard, boring announcement that GOG.com would be down for three days for technical reasons, we posted an unusual message that GOG.com “cannot remain in the current form,” but at the same time we wrote, “the idea behind GOG.com is not gone forever.” We actually tried to plant quite a few hints, but indeed, initially, the message caused quite a stir.
We were monitoring the situation and the first thing we noticed was that although all games at GOG.com are DRM-free and users essentially can download, back them up and do not need internet access at all in order to play them, they perceive us the same way as other digital platforms, where without internet access to the platform you pretty much are cut off from your games. We underestimated how strongly our customers would react to not having access to re-download their games, but we hope that we can make it up to those affected by continuing to deliver the best classic PC games for many years to come.
GameZone: What was the biggest challenge you faced in relaunching the site?
Iwinski: I would not call it a challenge, but the place where the most effort went was the development of the site – practically writing the code from scratch and redesigning a lot of elements to make it a truly new GOG.com experience. “Simplicity is the greatest sophistication” is the key idea we follow at GOG.com, and I have to say that our team did an excellent job here. Simplicity is actually good from the user side, but quite demanding on the dev and design site. GOG.com is full of new or redesigned features on which we have spent quite some time. My favorite is the redesigned community part, which is the essence of GOG.com, and finally even old-time gamers like me can use it with ease.
GameZone: Do you believe the relaunch was a success?
Iwinski: Yes, I believe it was. Actually, I should have mentioned it in the previous point – the main challenge was the traffic on the day we opened the new GOG.com. Although the new code accelerated the whole site by four to six times and we added several new servers, we got 20 times the highest traffic we’d ever had. That’s good, as it means that the idea of good old gaming has spread successfully but, at the same time, although the IT set up was several times faster than before, it still wasn’t working as fast as we were planning. Fortunately, we managed to add more server power quickly on the day of launch. Thanks to that we got where we planned to be in terms of the user experience.
GameZone: Considering that some gamers seem angry by the hoax, do you regret doing it?
Iwinski: We never had the intention of making anybody angry or harm them in any way. As I have mentioned before, we believe we planted some good hints that the site wasn’t actually shutting down, but right after we saw comments from the most confused and, yes, sometimes quite angry users, we immediately posted an update with clarifications and then a teaser trailer on Tuesday directly hinting at the new design/relaunch of the site and the arrival of Baldur’s Gate. Finally, we decided to host our conference on Wednesday dressed as monks, and asked for forgiveness and redemption. We stated then and still feel that we are sorry if anybody felt bad about the “unusual” relaunch strategy, but being old-school gamers and remembering a more relaxed and more guerrilla-like industry (instead of the corporate world these days), we decided to plan something else.
Do we regret it? Definitely not, but could we have handled some things differently? I am sure we could. We won’t take the site down like that again, but we’re not done doing some crazy things on the marketing side.
GameZone: During the online press conference, GOG claimed that it wants to be “the number one alternative to Steam.” That’s quite a bold claim.
Iwinski: If you look at the digital distribution market and the key players, as far as the new releases are concerned you have Steam and…that’s pretty much about it. I do not want to sound unfair, but looking at the numbers, they rule the digital distribution of new games. They were the first ones out there, they built their own model, delivered great tech, took all the risk and they are very successful. They get a well-deserved bonus for being the pioneer and building it all from scratch. All the other platforms just follow Steam, but I do not see anything special about them, any different philosophy or something new and fresh that would convince me to go there and buy my games there.
With GOG.com, we have taken a completely different route from the very beginning. We are specialized in good old games, and I believe we offer quite some added value, which is really unique. Being DRM-free, spending lots of time on making all the games work on modern OSs (and taking the responsibility for it), having the same prices and products worldwide and finally throwing lots of bonus materials and goodies to each title was not easy, but we consider it the essence of GOG.com. GOG.com represents the way we, as gamers, would like to buy and enjoy games, and looking at the constantly growing user base, we were not the only ones out there.
GameZone: What’s next for GOG?
Iwinski: We have some really great titles signed and coming toward Christmas and beyond. Frankly speaking, we are going after all good old games, so there is still quite some work to do here. That’s on the titles side, but we will also be constantly improving the site, redesigning and adding new features. GOG.com is about enjoying the game and sharing the good vibes with other gamers. We have already gathered a great user base, who enjoy GOG.com, but looking at the number of notebooks, netbooks and desktop PCs out there, we have only just started.
GameZone: Finally, this isn’t a question as much as it’s a personal request — I’d love to see Sam & Max Hit the Road in the GOG catalog!
Iwinski: I think it will not be a surprise if I say that we are working on it. We have already nearly 250 games in total up on GOG.com, but there are still a few missing – Sam & Max definitely being one of them. Our goal is to have all good old games under one roof, so visit frequently and you won’t be disappointed!
Official relaunch video:
