planescape: torment and baldur's gate at gog.com

[sweener2001]

after a pathetic PR stunt, they came back strong, releasing baldur's gate and planescape: torment onto their DRM free service.

while i know that a lot of guys here still have their first-run discs, this is still pretty great.

[Johan_H]

Pathetic how? I mean, it worked; every gaming site wrote something, and every forum had a thread about it.

I hope they'll get Baldur's Gate II too sometime soon, I've been wanting to play it again.

[sweener2001]

people say that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and they'd be wrong.

quite a few people switched to dotemu, another drm free game distributor. i was pretty mad for a bit.

they could have just as easily created hype, instead of fear.

[Johan_H]

For every purchase they may have lost, I bet they gained at least two. They got crazy traffic the first few days after they came back. The important thing (for gog) is that lots of more people now know about gog, or were reminded of it.

What is there to be mad about, other than not being able to download your purchased games for a few days (which I'm guessing didn't really have anything to do with the prank anyway)?


Anyway, eh, I might check out torment.

[sweener2001]

there was the fact that i thought a digital distributor whom i have given money to was going out of business, and that i would be stuck in a mad dash trying to get my games downloaded one more time along with the entirety of their customer base.

not exactly a pleasant scenario.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Not to mention it raised that looming specter that no one wants to talk about with online distribution... once a service goes down, you've lost all your games.

While in GoG's case, this just means you've lost everything you hadn't already downloaded, in the case of most other services, it means you've lost EVERYTHING.

Everyone's been ignoring the issue up until now, but this has reminded people that these companies don't last forever, even when they seem invincible.



It is PROBABLY best to NOT do a marketing gimmick that underlines exactly how fragile your product really is.

[Johan_H]

Well it's a non-issue really. What's going to keep me from just downloading a crack or whatever for all my steam games if/when it goes down? I paid for them just the same, I can play them just the same. Nothing important changed. (Though I guess with online multiplayer games it would be a bit trickier)

I do see how some would be a bit pissed about gog having them temporarily worried, but not enough to boycott. I mean, I see companies doing worse things to call attention to their product/service every day.

[sweener2001]

that doesn't make it right. i hate that argument. others doing the same thing justifies nothing.

it was a pathetic stunt that put them in a negative light. it might have worked this time, but if they continue to act like douches to their customers, they'll eventually leave.

the same can be said for any company, or person, or whatever.

it's sad, i was hoping to have people discuss the fact that these two awesome games are legitimately, cheaply, available. but i got sucked into the merits of lousy PR, instead.

[odditude]

these two awesome games are legitimately, cheaply, available.

woo! never played either when they first came out - i was a broke-ass college student then. can't believe BG came out 12 years ago...

[Johan_H]

i was hoping to have people discuss the fact that these two awesome games are legitimately, cheaply, available. but i got sucked into the merits of lousy PR, instead.

Sorry about that.
Though it's not like topics like these ever reach page two on this board anyway : (

[sweener2001]

point taken.

since we're already on a tangent, i took advantage of the weekend deal and got arcanum for 3 bucks.

[sweener2001]

....aaaand they've just got icewind dale as well.