Late last year, GOG was one of the few stores willing to host the indie horror game Horses. Steam and the Epic Games Store refused to sell the title, with the latter blocking it a day before its release.
It's now clear that GOG wasn't a mistake in allowing horses to be sold through its platform. In an interview with Eurogamer, GOG's managing director said this is a matter of principle as the team wants to uphold “creative freedom” in the gaming industry.
GOG isn't satisfied with payment processors deciding which games can be sold.
“As a company, we are always ready to take a stand on our own values and what we believe are the right values for the industry,” says Maciej Gołębiewski of GOG. “We believe in creative freedom, because once a company decides through their terms of service what’s good and what’s not good, what’s allowed, what can be sold and what can’t be sold, it’s a slippery slope from that point on.”
He went on to say that GOG is still “cautious” to avoid harming the company, but that in the case of Horses in particular, “there was nothing we could consider unsellable.”
GOG had to hire a private investigator to track down IP rights holders.
“Sorry to disturb you, but you own Deus Ex.”
Furthermore, he is specifically targeting ongoing pressure on stores to ban games containing adult material, something Visa and Mastercard have successfully done through Steam and others. “That's the role of regulators and governments to decide what's legal and what's illegal, not the companies that hold Visa and Mastercard together, but to decide whether they can sell something once they have probably 90% of the market,” he says. “For me it is a question of freedom.”
As for the future of GOG, new owner and original founder Michał Kiciński agrees that registering horses with GOG is the right move. So it appears that he will continue to stick to his philosophy in the future. After all, GOG doesn't host games that use DRM, which helps fill a storefront that many publishers avoid.
For now, the power of payment processors to limit the content hosted on their stores remains an issue. It doesn't look like anything will change anytime soon, but the gaming industry still has some alternatives to fall back on.
