GOG MD warns fewer games may come out if developers are forced to keep them online forever

The managing director of PC platform GOG, Maciej Gołębiewski, has warned that developers and publishers might make fewer new games if they know they need to keep these titles online forever.

Speaking to Eurogamer, the executive said that the pressure to keep a new release online indefinitely could make securing funding even more challenging for games companies; these costs would be on top of the existing money required to make and market a new title initially.

Gołębiewski’s comments come in the midst of a conversation surrounding game preservation and companies taking service-based titles, such as Ubisoft’s The Crew, offline. There are consumer campaigns, such as Stop Killing Games, which are lobbying governments to introduce legislation to dissuade publishers and developers from taking titles offline.

“There is a broader discussion to be had within the industry of what does an end-of-life cycle look like in games – what is a fair end-of-life cycle for a game?” Gołębiewski said.

“Should it just be buried and killed, and no one can access it anymore, and people who spent five or seven years working on it cannot really look at their creation anymore because the service turned off? There is a very interesting and very complicated discussion that Stop Killing Games probably kick-started out of frustration.

“We want to make games live forever. At the same time, if we put too many barriers on game creators and what the end-of-life cycle looks like, we might get fewer games, because people will be scared of ‘okay now I need to put up the funds to create it, promote it, and then upkeep it for 10 years, 20 years, because the regulator said so’. That might in turn cause there to be fewer cool games for gamers.”

The executive admitted that game preservation was a “very complicated riddle” that involved a number of hurdles. These include IP and ownership, technical details and commercial viability.

“No one can do it for goodwill because this is not how salaries are being paid,” Gołębiewski said.

This news comes days after EA pulled its troubled service-based action RPG, Anthem, offline almost seven years after its release.

GOG was recently acquired from CD Projekt by its original co-founder, Michał Kiciński, in a deal worth $25 million. We caught up with the executive to discuss his plans for the PC platform earlier this month.