/noclip
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2018–2025
42:47 · 459K views · Jul 23, 2018
A /noclip documentary on GOG, covering how it finds and re-releases classic games and pushes DRM-free releases. It also touches on the company's origins in Poland.
HN points to it as a good documentary on GOG's history and the difficulty of tracking down rights holders.
6 comments from Hacker News
An interesting point from the history of GOG is that it originated from a market where piracy was the norm, Noclip has a great documentary about it: this video
Noclip did an interesting documentary about GOG. "GOG: Preserving Gaming's Past & Future" this video
Something else to consider is motivating piracy. If they sell a piece of software for a flat price in all geos, the ones who can't afford it will invest more time in pirating the software. As a side effect, piracy is normalized in those communities as a necessary way of life in the digital world. Naturally, their tools and methods will leak out to other communities and make piracy easier in places that CAN afford them. Devs would rather sell to those communities at a "loss" than ostracize them and deal with the fallout. Check out this brief description of how software proliferated in Poland during the early years of computers (3:09-8:27): this video
I'm sure this was alluded to in NOCLIP's YouTube documentary on GOG[0]. It was said then that half of the battle was tracking down rights holders as IP had sometimes been absorbed through multiple acquisitions by the time they came to restore some games. [0] - this video
GOG shows that paying for drm-free games in a country where copyright was unenforced and piracy offered a better UX can still be profitable: [LINK] , this video