Last week’s GOG.com stunt was nothing short of confounding. For reasons (at the time) unknown, Good Old Games shut its virtual doors and offered little information regarding its future, leaving customers to wonder what would happen to their ability to re-download purchased games. This was after a tweet from the company’s official account obliquely stated, “Sometimes it’s really hard being DRM-free … hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy.”
When the site relaunched less than a week later and revealed the hoax for what it was, after days of … less descriptive explanations as to what was going on, fans and customers were understandably upset. GOG publicly apologized last Wednesday on Twitter, saying, “We really are sorry to those who felt deceived. It was done with the best of intentions, hopefully we can make it up to you.” After all that, we asked GOG managing director Guillaume Rambourg what in the world happened.
First and foremost, he said that last week’s temporary closure of GOG was inevitable for the site’s relaunch. “98% of the code of our website was rewritten to be able to welcome more users and deliver a better experience, which required a major change in our backend and as a matter of fact, taking down our platform for a few days,” Rambourg explained. He told us that management was faced with two options: make an “official ‘boring’ statement” or take “a more creative route.” As evidenced by the past week, it’s pretty clear management chose the latter.
And even though the reaction hasn’t been 100 percent positive, Rambourg said he’d do the same thing all over again given the chance.
Continue reading GOG.com’s Guillaume Rambourg explains what happened last week
GOG.com’s Guillaume Rambourg explains what happened last week originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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