GOG.com announces that
Fallout,
Fallout 2, and
Fallout
Tactics are no longer for sale on their DRM-free marketplace, apologetically, but
vaguely citing "circumstances beyond [their] control." Here's the explanation of how this impacts people who have already purchased one
or more of the seminal RPGs:
All those who acquired Fallout, Fallout 2,
or Fallout Tactics on GOG.com prior to the date of removal (that is before
Tuesday, December 31st 2013, at 3:59PM GMT), will still be able to download the
games' install files (as well as the bonus content) via the "My Games" section
of their user accounts. Gift-codes for these three games acquired in our recent
giveaway are no longer valid. However, if you own a gift-code for any or all of
them that was purchased outside of the said giveaway, you'll still be able to
redeem it in the foreseeable future.
The
Batman Arkham Facebook page reveals plans for all-new story DLC coming to
Batman: Arkham Origins this year. They offer a cool image of a Wayne
Foundation Humanitarian of the Year trophy suggesting this will feature Mr.
Freeze. Thanks
GameInformer.
A
thread on NeoGAF
notes that the
Deadpool game released earlier this year to
mediocre reviews is no
longer being offered for sale on consoles or Steam, something easily verified by
a Steam search. There is speculation that this means the license to use the
Marvel superhero may have expired with the new year, and
GameInformer says they have yet to receive a reply from Activision to their
inquiries about this. In the meantime, the NeoGAF thread also notes places where
keys for the game are still available on a couple of other marketplaces for
those who seek them.
A survey being sent to "past and current"
World of Warcraft subscribers
probes for interest in a new annual pass program to accompany the upcoming
Warlords of Draenor expansion for the MMORPG. They survey also looks for answers
to questions like how much the expansion is worth and the possibility of selling
level 90 upgrades. Thanks
Polygon.
Speaking of
GOG.com (story above), there's an
interview on Ars Technica where GOG.com's managing director Guillaume
Rambourg discusses the success they've had selling games with no digital rights
management. Here's his example of their experience, which also touches on the
success of their
recently
implemented money-back guarantee:
There is an even more recent research
under way that seems to prove that dropping DRM in the music industry resulted
in an up to 41 percent increase in sales. GOG.com's DRM-free, day-one release of
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, a AAA+ game by any standards, is a great case
study. At release, the version widely available on torrent sites was not the
DRM-free GOG version but the one that posed any sort of challenge to the
hackers, the one that included DRM.
The game was downloaded illegally roughly 4.5 million times, but to use the
industry-wide practice and treat those entirely as "lost sales" is a massive
misunderstanding. Most pirates never had any intent to buy the game in the first
place; some surely became paying customers after trying it out or when the title
became available at a discounted price. To drive the point home, CDP Red won't
be using any DRM for their upcoming release of The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. As
Marcin Iwinski recently put it: "Will it be more pirated than if we put DRM on
it? I definitely don't think so. [...] With a DRM-free release, we're hoping to
build more trust between us and gamers."
Finally, in our own experience we've found that trusting users to treat us well
pays off and that our DRM-free approach is certainly not costing us business.
Two of the many examples that come to mind: we see an average number of
downloads per game that's somewhere below two—which means that users aren't
taking advantage of DRM-free gaming to share accounts around.
Another great example comes from our recent launch of our 30-day, money-back
guarantee where, if a game bought on GOG.com ends up not working despite what we
can do to help you, we'll refund you your money. While we've seen an uptick in
customer support requests, it's in the realm of a 200 percent or 300 percent
increase in queries that seem legitimate for the most part, not a titanic flood
of people who want to try to find a way to scam GOG.com out of a free game. I
believe that people, by and large, try to be good; treating them that way for
five years at GOG.com seems to bear out our hypothesis.
Happy New Year! Here's hoping your hangovers are under control, you can remember
everything you said last night, and you know, you didn't marry a stripper or
anything. We had a quiet New Year's Eve, so none of those are issues here today,
but the new year is still young, so there's still time for some debauchery.
Here's to a great 2014.
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