I think CD Projekt might just be my new best friend. Sure, the Polish-based publisher’s announcement of the awesome sounding downloadable game service, Good Old Games, might have influenced the feelings expressed in the previous sentence, but I’ve always liked them, honest!
GOG.com is an on-demand platform that will be stocked with classic PC games. That, in and of itself, is great, but what about it is providing me with that extra oomph of excitement? Firstly, the games will be cheap: priced at either $5.99 or $9.99. Secondly, the games are all guaranteed to work perfectly with Windows XP and Vista (sorry, Mac users), can be downloaded an infinite number of times, and will come with cool extras. Thirdly, and here’s the big one, every game will be completely DRM free. YES! Thank you, CD Projekt, for realizing that people don’t like copy protection in their legitimately purchased digital downloads.
“Our main goal is to create a user-friendly site with the best classic PC games for a price that might be considered impossible to achieve,” GOG.com managing director Adam Oldakowski stated. “The people behind GOG.com are gamers and we all know how difficult it is to find a lot of classic games. So we’ve started building a great games catalogue, gotten rid of the copy protection that gamers hate so much, optimized the games to work on modern operating systems, and made them cheap enough that piracy seems like a rip-off. It’s so easy to buy, download and install a game and then get deeply involved in the community; we’re very confident that gamers will absolutely love the site.”
So far, most of Good Old Game’s content is coming from Codemasters and Interplay, with titles like Fallout, Fallout 2, Freespace 2, MDK, Operation Flashpoint, and TOCA Race Driver 3 set to make an appearance when the service launches this September. Though if you can’t wait that long, there will be a closed beta starting in August that you can sign up for on the site.
CD Projekt has also revealed that one of their chief goals is to get all of LucasArts’ titles added to the service at some point. Why hello there, fans of classic adventure games. Can you see yourself buying a bunch of games you’d previously missed out on once Good Old Games launches?
