Good news and bad news, folks. The good news: Good Old Games isn’t shutting down at all! The bad news: Apparently Vince Russo is running the site’s PR department, because this type of “swerve” is rarely appreciated.
So let’s just focus on the good news while acknowledging that this whole “we can’t run in the current fashion any longer” was perhaps, well, stupid.
The site re-launches tomorrow, and it will no longer be in beta. Yay! It will also re-launch with a few new games, chief among them being Baldur’s Gate. All you people out there who thought that Dragon Age: Origins was fun but wanted something “a bit more,” well, now’s your chance.
(The release of Baldur’s Gate is actually pretty huge, considering what a pain it is to get the game to run at a modern resolution on a modern PC. I know: I bought the DVD version from Amazon during the summer.)
The site is said to be “ten times” faster. Great, I guess, but I never really found the site to be slow.
But, faster is clearly better.
As for that whole “we’re shutting down” gimmick, here’s how the site explains itself:
First of all we’d like to apologize to everyone who felt deceived or harmed in any way by the closedown of GOG.com. As a small company we don’t have a huge marketing budget and this why we could not miss a chance to generate some buzz around an event as big as launching a brand new version of our website
You know what? All is forgiven. I sincerely doubt anyone will give a damn about the publicity stunt this time next week (if not tomorrow when it re-launches).
In conclusion: woo~!