In general these days it’s never a good time to release a video game unless you’re Rockstar, but in recent months it’s been made even harder due to numerous payment processors cracking down on digital storefronts like Valve and Itch.io. There’s a host of reasons this is problematic, but one less spoken about how this is also an issue of preservation. GOG, another digital storefront, this one owned by The Witcher developer CD Projekt, is known for their preservation efforts, and in a recent interview they shared a bit of their thoughts in relation to these recent issues regarding payment processors.
When asked about GOG’s stance on what’s been happening with payment processors in recent months in an interview with Automaton, senior PR rep Piotr Gnyp had this to say: “At GOG, as a platform devoted to Good Old Games and video game preservation, we see it as a game preservation issue. Every year, many games are disappearing, for various reasons. Every game that disappears from distribution is potentially lost to game preservation efforts. It is particularly worrying when games are potentially vanishing due to external pressure.”
While possibly not quite as strong or confident an answer as I might like – after all, GOG has plenty of reasons to be wary of pissing off these same payment processors – there is something worth honing in on.
Steam and Itch.io are obviously not some kind of beautiful digital landscapes where games become hits after hits, both are much too saturated for that to happen. Plus, a majority of games on Steam are not DRM-free, meaning they require a connection to the storefront in question in order to be played. Most games on Itch and GOG are DRM-free, however.
The issue comes from the fact that, unfortunately, developers are forced into relying on third-party platforms to sell their games. It is incredibly hard to tell someone to come to your dedicated website to buy your game, and that only works insofar that you’ve found a payment processor to use that allows something like an adult game.
So what happens to these games when they have no place to call a home? How do we ensure that they continue to be available, when they might be hosted on the developer’s personal website, which in some cases few people might be aware of? It’s a difficult question to answer.
In this same interview, Gnyp notes that GOG is a “curated storefront,” continuing on to explain that this means “not every game submitted to us is accepted – we select titles based on quality, relevance, and alignment with our values and audience.” Again, that line about values feels like it could be a bit of a cop out, but the idea of curation is one worth exploring. It’s not a perfect solution, though it could be one way to at least keep some aspect of these unfairly shunned works alive. The question becomes how to do this, and right now, I’m still figuring it out, for myself at least.