Good Old Games signs Ubisoft into its digital catalogue

Good Old Games (GOG) is a digital distribution site for PC games specializing moreso in classics – at least a few years old, with some dating back to the early 90s – which opened its doors last year. The guys and gals who own it, CD Projekt – affiliated with The Witcher creators CDP Red – have a team running a darn good community to give it that something extra special, and following some big deals in the past (Epic Games, Apogee, Interplay, Codemasters), they're getting perhaps the biggest one of all today: Ubisoft.

What this means for you is games like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Yahtzee's favourite all-time game, if we're not mistaken, and that's saying something), Beyond Good & Evil, Far Cry, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, Heroes of Might & Magic: A Strategic Quest plus a boatload of others – we're hoping for the marvelous Grandia II, Rayman 2, and Myst series, so get to wishing – can be yours for a measly $6 or $10.

Sands of Time, Beyond Good & Evil, and IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 are the games available today – some real gems, surely some of the best of their kind; the rest and many more will come “soon”. Heroes was supposed to come out now also, but the GOG team is trying to negotiate a better price for it, so perhaps next week.

On top of all this, the games are Vista and XP compatible (Windows 7 and Mac, so far, too, counting some good results in compatibility layer software for the latter), Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free (meaning they're yours, forever, and you can play them wherever, whenever without any hitches), and come with extras like soundtracks, guides, wallpapers, and/or whatever else they can get their hands on.

Aside from the huge boost to the service expected by Ubisoft's signing, this is also a big deal for gamers who don't like DRM. More and more it seems like PC gaming publishers are accepting and/or pushing this as a “necessary” standard, with Ubisoft having been, absolutely, one of the most visible companies behind this notion. This is particularly because – as our writer Kevin Spiess attests -- their title Splinter Cell (which used the notorious Starforce protection) was possibly the only one in about the last half-decade not cracked by pirates before or very shortly after a game's release, that one taking months, something unheard of to this day. Wonderfully, this is one of the games that will be coming to GOG in the future.

The company showed a little leniency with Far Cry 2, but that one was still loaded with DRM. Prince of Persia (2008), on the other hand, had none (discounting disk copy protection, according to the box), with their community manager announcing as such in the forums, and the news making the rounds at many media outlets, including our own GameGrep.

Judging by this move and the GOG deal, it seems like Ubisoft is one company that truly wants to make some positive changes in the gaming industry, for themselves and gamers, too. While they didn't return our message requesting an interview (busy, we assume), GOG's PR & Marketing fella Lukasz Kukawski told us the company appears to have a cause, one that's good for everybody:

“From our perspective it looks like Ubisoft is trying to change the overall perception of DRM by the big publishers,” he says. “We do understand publishers want to protect their games somehow from getting pirated, but there aren’t really any forms of DRM that haven't been cracked.”

“We're all gamers at GOG.com and we hate the DRM thing and the idea of treating honest gamers like criminals. We hoped that launching GOG.com as a DRM-free service would trigger the avalanche and more publishers will realize that restrictive copy protection is not the best way to fight piracy. I don't believe publishers will completely stop using DRM schemes, but it could lead to a situation where such restrictive copy protection will no longer exist. Signing the deal with one of the biggest publishers in the world, Ubisoft, is definitely another step in this direction.”

As for the future of GOG, well, that's still not set in stone, though with CDP behind them, they “have enough resources to be stubborn to the final success”. Anyhow, the future is looking especially bright lately, if not arduous:

“Looking at GOG.com's expanding catalogue of newly released classics and signed publishers it's hard to say the economic crisis is slowing us down,” remarks Kukawski. “We're really happy that we've managed to hold up with our resolution to add 2 or more titles every week. Thanks to the growing group of publishers that decided to join GOG.com and offer their back catalogue DRM-free for a reasonable price we can offer our users almost 100 (!) great games including Duke Nukem 3D, Simon the Sorcerer, Fallout, Oddworld, Unreal and many, many more.”

“I don't think it's time to say that we've made it and we can just enjoy our success. We can definitely say we're going in the right direction, but the way ahead us is still long and we still have a lot of publishers to sign and a lot of classics to revive. The deal with Ubisoft is a huge step for us and I can't imagine that other big publishers won't notice that. So if any of the decision-makers at publishing companies are reading this just drop us a line if you want to join the GOG.com revolution!”

Congratulations to GOG on the signing and major kudos to Ubisoft for being so darn cool. Now bring Grandia II, please!