Well this is interesting:
GOG.com, the digital retailer best known for selling old games without DRM, is branching out into film and TV. The folks at GOG are pushing hard on the “DRM-free” angle here too, promising that nothing they sell will be saddled with the copyright restrictions you might get while buying a TV show on iTunes or Amazon.
They’re starting small, launching with a handful of independent documentaries for $US5.99 a piece in hopes of eventually branching out to studio films and television shows.
“Most of [the studios we spoke to] admit that DRM does not protect anything, all protections are cracked on the day of the release of the movie or even before and that there is no DRM that can protect a movie against piracy,” said a GOG representative in an email to Kotaku. “The whole industry knows DRM is just smoke and mirrors and it does not work, so why not abandon it?”
GOG will launch the service with some 20 indie documentaries about gaming and internet culture. The current lineup includes Indie Game: The Movie, Good Game, and Please Subscribe, among others.
It’s an interesting step in the battle between GOG.com and its biggest competitor in the world of virtual game stores, Steam. Earlier this year, GOG announced plans to launch an online gaming client called GOG Galaxy, which offers much of what Steam does, minus any DRM or copyright restrictions.
GOG’s people say they have had discussions with film studios about selling some of the bigger shows and films, though they haven’t secured anything yet.
“These are very smart people and they see that the anti-piracy measure does not work at all,” said a GOG rep in an email. “We realise that the movie industry is much older than the gaming industry and it moves slower, with caution. As such, we’ll get started with some real examples to show that it works — hence our first batch of 20 documentaries.”
Comments
14 responses to “GOG To Start Selling Movies And TV Shows”
I was hoping for gog to release older stuff to compliment their game catalogue. I can hope one day I’ll be able to get the complete Perfect Strangers series from them 😉
Don’ be ridikoloos…
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Oh man – Perfect Strangers (and Barney Miller!) was the first thing I thought of with that headline! Shows that are literally out of print and have never had adequate DVD sets
Dear Village Roadshow Australia,
This is how you attract our money.
Signed,
An “crazy” Australia that does care.
They have Playing Columbine, which I highly recommend. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
My god. Valve without real competition have created a monopoly that the vast majority of users love.
What kind of glory would come from actual competition? I honestly don’t know what Valve would do if they had to react, which they likely will…
Not to be rude, but Valve does have competition. Besides GoG, there is still Origin.
The only difference is GoG is competition for mostly the retro/indie market while Value is mostly AAA or main stream with a free retro additions for variety. The overlap is very small but the competition is there.
Origin is competition but of the untrained, near sighted variety and having Origin installed is like how things were back in the 90s with RealPlayer.
No rudeness read, I excluded Origin as competition as it has a very bad reputation among gamers, and would have a hard time getting Steam levels of acceptance and love.
So is direct boxed sales as well as the console market.
Humble bundle and the like have DRM free versions and most games available on steam can be purchased directly from the developers website
Yes and no. Sometimes, the direct download costs more than the boxed version.
For example, the virtualisation software, Parallels, costs $10 more online than it does the boxed version at some stores.
Then again, I’m biased as I do not see how the online version should ever cost the same as the boxed version. It should be lower as there is no printing, etc.