When provocative horror game Horses was banned from sale on Steam and the Epic Game Store late last year, it nearly led to the closure of acclaimed Italian studio Santa Ragione – denied, as it was, access to some of the world’s largest paying game audiences. But amid the panicked delistings there was another company determined to sell Horses and throw Santa Ragione a lifeline: Poland-based online store GOG.
It was a bold stand in a year of panicked delistings and removals of games deemed to contain adult content – action seemingly pushed and enforced by powerful payment providers MasterCard and Visa. This censorious approach sought to outlaw grotty pornographic games, but it caught all kinds of well-meaning games in its net, including games like Horses. GOG would not only stand up to this action by selling Horses but it launched an anti-censorship movement in response.
GOG managing director Maciej Gołębiewski told me, reflecting on the decision in an interview, that it was a “matter of freedom” for him. “We as a company are always ready to take a stand on values – our own and also what we believe are the right values for the industry,” he said. “We believe in creative freedom, because once a company, through their own terms of service, decides what’s good and what’s not good – what’s acceptable; what can be sold and what cannot be sold – it’s a slippery slope from that point onward.
“We obviously are a business and we do assess our risks,” he added, “because we don’t want to hurt the business, we don’t want to hurt the employees, and we don’t want to hurt the players by doing so. So we are also careful. But with Horses… We are a curated storefront so we are actually playing the games that we are selling. The game is obviously controversial but there’s nothing there that should deem it couldn’t be sold.
“That’s the role of regulators and governments to decide – democratic governments – what’s legal and what’s not legal, not companies that hold – Visa and MasterCard together – probably 90-something-percent of the market, then just decide whether something can be sold or not. For me it’s a matter of freedom.”
“We are a curated storefront so we are actually playing the games that we are selling”
Michał Kiciński – the new owner of GOG – put it more succinctly when he said to me: “Curation is the privilege and prerogative of each platform. The difference here with Horses is that we’ve played the game and we thought it was very cool.”
GOG became an independent and private company at the end of December, meaning it’s no longer a part of Polish superstar game-maker CD Projekt, which GOG had been for its entire 17-year (more like 18 if you count internal development) history. Michał Kiciński owns the company now. Coincidentally, he was one of the people who originally launched GOG, and he was one of the founders of CD Projekt, so he knows the businesses well. Kiciński left CD Projekt in 2012 in need of a break but remained – and remains – a major shareholder.
This newfound independence and autonomy allows GOG to be bolder; Kiciński has already said “I’m not afraid of risk” in relation to the company’s future. But beyond a possible move into indie game publishing there aren’t plans to change what GOG does and what people like it for. Primarily the business is built on reviving classic games, both old and modern, and preserving them for years to come. It’s also eternally committed to offering games without any kind of DRM.
But GOG does also sell newer games – and big games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. However, it does this selectively – a form of curation it believes is another notable difference in today’s overcrowded gaming world.
As Gołębiewski explained: “The area of specialisation for GOG is the classics and the modern classics, where we want to provide a superior experience to any other store or a platform out there. That’s why [we have] the GOG Preservation Program and why we are working hard on the first-party software to make sure that games are playable and stay playable 20, 30 years from now. Apart from that, obviously we welcome any good game onto the platform, because we want our users to have as rich a catalogue as possible, with quality being the limiting factor.”
“This is very important,” Kiciński said, continuing the thought, “because the difference – the big difference – between Steam and GOG, for example, is that GOG is a very curated platform. Playability and fun-factor are the most important for us, no matter if the game is an old classic, new classic, or indie game with great fun-factor. That’s the specialty of GOG: to deliver games with the great fun-factor and playability despite the age.”
It’s still early days in GOG’s independent new era, and it’s worth pointing out that while GOG is technically a competitor to Steam, Kiciński’s business has around two percent of the market, he said, while Steam has something like 80 percent, so there’s an enormous difference in size. But as Kiciński pointed out, “It’s super difficult to defend such a big market share,” and perhaps as players seek alternatives to Steam’s overloaded catalogue, a few percentage points might creep elsewhere.
