GOG.com is Not Shutting Down, After All

We reported yesterday that the game delivery service “Good Old Games” was shutting down, but as heavily speculated, it turns out that the entire thing was a hoax. GOG.com is here to stay, and during an online conference held earlier today, the company announced that the service will be re-launching tomorrow, sans the “Beta” tag, and with new game launches to celebrate.

Alright, allow me to ask the same question that a million others already have… whose idea was this? Of course, there’s no way such an idea was coordinated by just one person, so I almost have to question the maturity level of the GOG.com team. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the stupidest ways to garner media attention. I’m not one to believe the fable that “any press is good press”, either.

The fact of the matter is, GOG.com essentially pushed all of its faithful customers out, lied to them about the status of the site, and at the same time, disallowed them to grab their downloads. This all the while some good promotions were going on. I have little doubt that many people purchased games that were immediately inaccessible. Imagine purchasing a game digitally and then having to wait an entire week to actually access it. Sheesh.

Gripes aside, the company will be unveiling a slew of videos today, to warm people up to the re-launch, which can all be seen on the the site itself. I don’t plan to watch them, but apparently they are fairly humorous. They still do little to remedy the situation that the company caused, though.

Despite the fact that I think this type of marketing ploy is the dumbest ever, I’m glad that the company isn’t dead, because I find what it’s doing to be important to gaming as a whole. It keeps the classics alive, and generally, many of the classics are better than anything released today (to me). Being able to purchase them, DRM-free, is a very good thing.

First of all we would like to apologize everyone who felt deceived or harmed in any way by us closing down GOG.com without any warning and without giving access to your games. We apologize for that from the bottom of our hearts!

Now it’s time we put an end to all the speculations once and for all. It’s true that we decided that we couldn’t keep GOG.com the way it was… so we won’t. As you probably know by now, GOG.com is entering its new era with an end of the two-years beta stage and we’re launching a brand new GOG.com with new, huge releases.