screwit,it’soldtitlesanyway,it’sgoing
tobefine,andit was!Nowthey’reoneof
ourawesome,awesomepartners.GETTINGTHERIGHTS
MartaAdamskais headofbizdevat
GOG,whichentailsa greatdealof
sleuthingtofindthepeoplewhoown
therightstoclassicgamessoGOG
cansellthem.
MartaAdamska:Withclassictitles,
mostrightsarelostbetweenand could serve terabytes of data on
an international scale.
Piotr Karwowski: Back then there
were no cloud services and the people
we hired had no experience of digital
distribution. We had to figure out how to
get it to work. And I know this will sound
counterintuitive but I think it was the
biggest blessing for GOG. We believed it
could be done. I’m pretty sure that if we
had industry veterans on the team,
they’d have told us to drop the whole
idea, but we were naive and it worked.
There’s a Terry Pratchett quote I love
dearly, which goes, ‘The vital ingredient
of success is not knowing that what you
attempt cannot be done.’
Over the course of 2007, GOG the
platform was steadily built, and
everyone at CD Projekt loved it. That
was all well and good, but GOG still
had a major problem: it didn’t have
any games to sell.
Piotr Karwowski: As a distributor, CD
Projekt knew a lot of companies [like]
Ubisoft and Blizzard, so we were certain
they’d agree. I mean, their
games were pirated anyway!
But it proved not to be so easy.
The holy grail to find a company to
sign up took seven or eight months; we
knocked on every door. No one wanted
to be first.
Oleg Klapovsky: Interplay were
different, because the only rights they
had were rights for super-old games,
and some of them weren’t sold
anywhere. For Interplay, GOG was an
easy deal because they couldn’t sell
these titles anywhere else.
Marta Adamska: The signature took
ages and at the end of the day they said,
LEFT: In the ’90s,
CD Projekt helped
bring Baldur’s Gate
to Poland.
BELOW: Baldur’s
Gate II was made
available on GOG in
November 2010.companies, liquidation, bankruptcies,
mergers and acquisitions. And it’s not
always that obvious. Some agreements
are written in a way where after a certain
amount of time the rights revert to the
developer. But the rights for what? The
code? The IP? The character, the music?
Actually, every one is separate. There
are games where we’ve signed five-way
agreements, and some rights went to
one party and are blocked by another.
It’s insanely complicated to track it all.