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During the presentation, GOG.com's co-founder Marcin Iwiński and managing director Guillaume Rambourg had dressed as monks to atone for their sins. The site returned on 23 September 2010, with an improved storefront and additional benefits, as outlined during a webcast presentation. As a small company we don't have a huge marketing budget and this is why we could not miss a chance to generate some buzz around an event as big as launching a brand new version of our website and even more important, bringing back Baldur's Gate to life!" The site's management, aware of the reactions to the fake closure, stated: "First of all we'd like to apologize to everyone who felt deceived or harmed in any way by the closedown of GOG.com. On 22 September 2010, GOG.com revealed that this shutdown was a marketing hoax as part of the site coming out of beta. A clarification posted on the site on 20 September 2010 said they had to shut down the site temporarily "due to business and technical reasons", with industry journalists believing the shutdown may be related to the nature of DRM-free strategy, based on Twitter messages from the company. A spokesman for Good Old Games reiterated that the site was not being shut down, and confirmed news would be forthcoming about changes to the service. Marketing stunt and relaunch ĭuring a period of days from 19 to 22 September 2010, the GOG.com website was disabled, leaving behind messages on the web site and their Twitter accounts that the site had been closed. Once Ubisoft was signed, it became easier for Good Old Games to convince other publishers to allow them to offer older titles on the service. After some time, Good Old Games was approached by Ubisoft, who were interested in selling their older titles through the service as well. Their first challenge was to find a publisher that would be willing to work with them they spoke to several who were generally unaware of CD Projekt their first big break was from Interplay, who knew of the company's past work, and allowed them to offer their games on the service. They founded a new subsidiary, Good Old Games, to serve this purpose in early 2008.
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In this manner, they would have a reason to draw players to buy their product instead of simply downloading it for free from pirate game websites and services.
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CD Projekt saw potential to look back at their distribution days to offer DRM-free versions of classic games through digital distribution, using their past experience in reverse engineering to make the games work on modern platforms and provide a wide array of localization options. ĭigital distribution grew in the 2000s, along with the use of DRM to control access to games, which raised some resentment with players. The company's interest in game distribution has declined since then. This eventually proved fruitful, as it ultimately landed the company with rights to The Witcher video game series. However, as a result, CD Projekt realized they had the ability to make their own games, and moved into games development. As their past work had been strictly on personal computers, the company accepted to try to port it, but the project fell through before it was completed.
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Due to this success, Interplay, the publisher of Baldur's Gate, asked CD Projekt if they could do a similar treatment to Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, a console title released in 2001. Their first major success was with Baldur's Gate (1998) with which they had 18,000 units sold on its first day of release in Poland.
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They would then package the game with localized instruction manuals and other physical goodies, hoping that the added features would draw buyers away from pirated copies. They would obtain import rights from foreign publishers, and where possible, provide in-game localization for text and voice lines, typically through reverse engineering to decompile the game's code. ĬD Projekt was founded by Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński in 1994 for the purposes to trying to bring legitimate sales of foreign game titles into Poland, knowing they would have no easy way to compete against pirated copies. The consumer perception of copyright in Poland remained the same after the change of government, making it difficult for legitimate sales of electronic media pirated and bootlegged versions were sold in open markets next to boxed copies of the legitimate productions for a fraction of the cost.
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While under Communism, copyright laws in Poland were virtually non-existent and unenforceable, and copyright infringement, in the form of piracy by stripping out any digital rights management (DRM), was rampant across electronic media. Poland, where CD Projekt and Good Old Games were founded, had previously been under communist rule but in 1989, the old government had fallen in favor of a more liberal government which spurred economic growth.
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