GOG closed, but 'this doesn't mean GOG is dead' [update]

This is going to go unnoticed by the gaming community at large. Competitors of Joystiq suck because they don't pay attention to the little guy.

@Ellimem

That's funny, I've seen this story on every other outlet before Joystiq even posted the story....

http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4aP2iKa16g

@SnorlaxTheSerialKiller

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWEpWb1Nt8E

@JCDenton

I kind of guessed this. Especially with the "GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form."

@JCDenton

Wow. You're right.

I can't figure out if this is the most brilliant or the most idiotic marketing ploy ever.

@JCDenton Assholes.

@Special Agent Steve
If this is indeed a stunt, your response is EXACTLY what they were going for. :)

Can't blame piracy on this, it really was too much of a niche to survive.

@Frank Lee whoops, meant that as a separate comment.

@Muskie

Terrible marketing stunt, if it's true. All it's going to to is make people like me have less trust in the direct download model. I've only recently been buying games lately from gamersgate, direct2drive, goodoldgames, and impulse, since there have been some wonderful sales. But now I have to ask myself... will these sites be around next month? Next year? What am I really buying?

And then bring my business back to Steam, since they're probably the most profitable and therefore the one most likely to stick around.

@Icupnimpn2 Of course the irony there is that GOG's wares are DRM free, which means you can archive the files after purchase, rendering the site's existence unnecessary and irrelevant for your continued enjoyment and access of your purchase.

In the case of steam, even if it lasts 10 years longer, once it's gone, so are your games(unless of course they manage a way to de-drm the purchased games or something)

@buster42

I think you're missing one of the very big advantages GoG has over the competition. The lack of any DRM on the games they sell allows you to make your own personal backups of your purchases without any trickery, in addition to the usual digital distribution methods of redownloading the files.

You might say their selection is "meh" if you haven't been a fan of their selection, but I'm confused as to how DRM-free downloads count as a "very meh service" in anyone's eyes.

@(Unverified) It's more their pricing than anything, honestly. Their selection also sometimes goes away from the "Old" part of GOG, I've noticed, like Two Worlds (which, as far as I know, doesn't qualify as "Good" either. 1/3 ain't bad?). There are some nice games I've picked up from them, though. I've never run into any problems with DRM (mainly by avoiding games with terrible DRM), so I guess being DRM-free, which is an advantage to most, just hasn't come up as anything for me.

Mainly, I just prefer Steam on pricing and selection.

@wcarnation Yes, yes it does. I think that they will be taking everything we said during one of their recent GOG.com Question Times into account when creating the new website/service/whatever.

For those of you who are Apple fans, this is actually what they do all the time when they introduce new products (i.e. take down the store and put it back up when they're good and ready).

I wouldn't be surprised if that was indeed what was going on. They now no longer have any more extreme marketing schemes to foist off on the public, so I think they've got some serious stuff up their sleeves for their return.

I may be reading way too much into the lines "GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form" and "... putting this era behind us as new challenges await", but then again, wcarnation may have also.

Even weirder, GOG.com still has their Twitter account (@GOGcom), and the last tweet reads as follows: "The official statement from GOG's management about the situation will be announced soon. We'll have more details about this tomorrow."

If that doesn't say they're making a new version of GOG at the Polish offices of CDProjekt, even bringing GOG out of the looooooooong beta that the service has been in, then I don't know what would. Especially since they dropped the ".com" from "GOG.com", an interesting omission if you look at that message. It's definitely not that there were 0 characters left on Twitter, I just looked at it in my Twitter client of choice and there are 7 characters left in that message I quoted above. So they could very easily have put the ".com" into their name, but they oddly didn't.

Again, tell me if I have read waaaaaaaaayyyy too much into this, but something tells me that if this marketing ploy DOESN'T backfire in all of their faces (which some negative Nancys have already spouted forth), this could prove to be one heck of a brilliant strategic move.

The plot thickens...

BJ

@(Unverified)
*stunts. Needs more edit button