Escort Mission #1: Good Old Games’ ‘Closure’ Stunt Was Brilliant Marketing

Posted September 29, 2010 by Martin Wharmby.

Only a certified sadist would truly enjoy the Escort Mission, but sometimes you’ve got to stick up for the sluggish NPC bullet sponge just to mix things up. Welcome to our new regular opinion column that isn’t afraid to go against the grain…

The idea that beloved source of retro digital downloads Good Old Games could up and close without warning was a real shock to the system. Was it bowing to publisher pressure? A victim of the big money-makers in the industry exerting undue pressure on smaller digital distributors, forcing them into adopting corpulent DRM systems. Had it been sunk by a lack of sales? We’re a severely apathetic and indifferent bunch, us gamers, but surely our appetite for classic PC gaming hadn’t dried up overnight.

Yet when word started to spread across the internets that this was little more than a marketing ploy, rage and flaming spread out across the forums, the twitterverse and the wider social media feeds. Profane teenage tirades, needless anger and judgemental tuts of displeasure battered GOG creators CD Projekt for days. When GOG’s management team finally emerged for a press conference webcast, they came out dressed as monks, explaining in awkward, Polish-strained English that the closure was a cover. While it was offline the website underwent a thorough overhaul and upgrade, putting into place new features and, of course, adding Baldur’s Gate to the catalogue.

It went down as well as you’d expect: like a sack full of bricks dropped onto sack full of doe-eyed kitten orphans. Evidently the Pope is right: the Godless kids of today just don’t have any respect for faking your own death, only to rise again a few days later with amplified bandwidth. It wasn’t just a dumb stunt, gamers decried: it was a juvenile prank perpetrated by a group of desperate, attention seeking chancers. It was decided that GOG had exhausted two years of good will and hard work trying to drum up interest in their new website. It was pretty much the same reaction Steam or the PSN gets during bouts of  maintenance: uncontrollable fury, death threats and a 572% global increase in the use of the incorrect spelling ‘basterds’ online. The only difference is that GOG’s outage wasn’t preceded by weeks of warning.

It’s hard to put your finger on who was actually wronged by GOG’s impromptu stunt though, or why exactly they deserved such a drubbing for their efforts. The extent of my frustration was letting out a resigned “well, fuck”, thinking that I’d finally paid the price for putting off the purchase of the Total Annihilation: Commanders Pack. I hadn’t lost access to any of my games though: after two years of membership I’d long since downloaded and backed up all of my purchases. My collection was sitting safe and sound on an external hard drive, free for me to install and play forevermore thanks to the total absence of DRM. Sure, there were bound to be GOG.com users who simply hadn’t had the time, bandwidth or foresight to download their purchases as soon as they were bought. This could have been a problem, but the placeholder website was quick to point out that even had this been a real closure, a solution was being put in place for later in the week.

Yet as much as an internet full hateful trolls armed with keyboard access will whinge and whine, it’s pretty hard to argue with the results. When GOG.com resurfaced on Thursday 23rd, an unprecedented number of viewers – 20 times the previous highest level of traffic for the site – managed to bring the site to its knees. It was taken out of action for a few minutes as servers strained to keep up with the demand. That’s pretty impressive work for a marketing budget of a few cryptic tweets, YouTube clips, a webcam and two brown dressing gowns.

As any games journalist who doesn’t spend their morning weeping into their Cornflakes will tell you, a significant chunk of industry news and events boil down to little more than creatively reductive press releases. For every revealing slip of the tongue or juicy rumour leaking out around the edges of a Non-Disclosure Agreement, there are fifty standard information documents bullet-pointing the Unique Selling Points of the next quarter’s parade of sequels. Something as different, inspired and prone to backlash like GOG’s death and rebirth doesn’t come along very often. Covering it is so much more enjoyable than discussing the latest slimy, unnatural info-nugget about the third level plasma gun in Dead Whatever 4.

When Microsoft strapped a man in a space marine costume to a jet pack, and had him fly around Trafalgar Square at Stupid O’Clock in the morning to promote Halo: Reach, did you really pay any more attention? It wasn’t as if Halo: Reach wasn’t already going to be the second biggest game launch of the year behind Call of Duty: Black Ops. London’s soul-crushed early morning commuters hardly gave a toss about the flying man, and that stunt cost a small fortune. Imagine just how little CD Projekt spent dressing like pillocks and denying access to their service, and how much more coverage it got.

And that, in essence, is what great marketing is really all about. You create word of mouth and generate interest in a service without relying on tired avenues of exposure, glossy advertising or wasteful, hideously expensive stunts aimed at the wrong audiences. Good Old Games made everyone sit up and take notice about their service just by pressing all of the right buttons to piss the internet off, and reignite the DRM argument. What other service can say that being offline has had a positive effect on page impressions?