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GoG's Guillaume Rambourg

Good Old Games' MD on the future of the past

GamesIndustry.biz How much does GoG contribute to CD Projekt's overall revenue – is it one of the larger parts of the business?
Guillaume Rambourg

It's hard to say. I think this is a question for my boss... Generally though, CDP is focused on three key areas, which is retail distribution in certain countries, development with The Witcher 2 and Good Old Games. I have no clear visibility on which is the biggest, but we are performing above expectations so far. We are really happy with what we have achieved so far.

GamesIndustry.biz How are you feeling about the state of digital distribution in general? The NPD have claimed it's accounting for around half of PC game sales – does that seem to match up with your experience, given CDP does retail and digital?
Guillaume Rambourg

I saw that, yes. I'm glad about those stats, because it's showing that guys like us, and all those other platforms, that we are convincing the users step by step to give up retail distribution and move up slowly to the digital universe. So we are hopeful for the future. I think it reflects what we are seeing, we have more and more users – we have been doing this for two years and we have growing, growing traffic, we are seeing more and more companies with the key features from the digital universe.

GamesIndustry.biz Would you recommend anyone else get into the digital distribution market at this stage?
Guillaume Rambourg

I would not. I mean... the market is free, right. Anybody can join, feel free to compete with GoG, absolutely fine. But the thing is again, we are not looking at the competition because we really want to play up our singularity and difference. So anybody can join, right. It's a growing market. But we are not so much worried - I wish them good luck. [laughs]

GamesIndustry.biz How tough is it to get gamers' attention when there are so many demands for their time and money? Now we've got Facebook and iPhones providing games you can play for just a couple of minutes
Guillaume Rambourg

Our... mission, our challenge is to develop our difference, but not forgetting the key communication challenges from nowadays, like Facebook. We have to find the right balance between using mainstream tools to promote a different message. We don't want to convey a classical message using classic means. So we use those vehicles of communication to spread a different message.

GamesIndustry.biz Has that been challenging, not being able to use the marketing originally created for these games because it's out of date, so you have to start almost from scratch?
Guillaume Rambourg

We have to come up with new ideas all the time. The thing is, we are quite surprised that so many publishers have forgotten their great old brands. Brands just gathering dust somewhere in the corner. We like removing the dust and showing them that there are still some people who will buy those games. And even beyond that, even today we still believe that there is an audience who would be interested in old games. I will take an example – point and click games. I think nowadays, everybody has a girlfriend or a mum who likes adventure games. Those games, they could be appealing to today's audience. We like to go back to the roots.

GamesIndustry.biz How much have you experimented with marketing to non-gamers rather than older games?
Guillaume Rambourg

We are open to anybody. Of course we have old games, but from another point of view we are taking a step by step approach where we believe that old games can be promoted and presented properly to today's audience. And this is the mission we want to achieve in the future, taking the young gamers to GoG. I have some good examples – we are working with key publishers like Activision and they say a couple of times that they are quite glad because they see the young gamers, like 16 or 20, they bought games on GoG and somehow we strengthened the brand nowadays. We turn young users into faithful fans.

GamesIndustry.biz On a final note, what's the Polish government's attitude towards the local games industry? There's a hullaballoo in Britain about the withdrawal of planned tax breaks, while places like Canada and Russia are offering incentives.
Guillaume Rambourg

I don't think that the government as such is giving some advantages. All I know is that Poland is benefiting from the European fund. So I heard about a couple of projects in Poland being financed, being funded by the EU. But the government as such, not giving advantages to companies coming and settling here, it's more like from the EU.

Guillaume Rambourg is managing director of Good Old Games. Interview by Alec Meer.

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Alec Meer: A 10-year veteran of scribbling about video games, Alec primarily writes for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but given any opportunity he will escape his keyboard and mouse ghetto to write about any and all formats.
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