Good Old Games is the best digital seller and distributor of computer games hands down.
They offer a variety of games from the past 30-plus years in a variety of genres, and as of today, they have more than 500 titles available through their service.
GOG was launched in 2008 by CD Projekt, a Polish video-game publisher best known in the U.S. for “The Witcher” role-playing video games. It originally only sold games for Windows but has branched out and now sells games compatible with the Mac OS X operating system.
Its biggest selling point, and the reason it has thrived, is their decision not to include any form of copy protection, or DRM, with the games they sell.
DRM stands for “Digital Rights Management,” or simply put, it’s what prevents you from using a program you’ve paid for.
It can take on a variety of forms from a simple CD key you have to type in when you install a new program, to limiting the number of times you can install a program, requiring you to be connected to the internet at all times while using the program and even forcing you to install other and potentially harmful programs onto your computer.
GOG includes no DRM with any of the games they sell, and they have even removed DRM from games that contained it in their original releases—in addition to making their games compatible with modern computers.
GOG also doesn’t limit the number of times you can download a game you’ve purchased, and you don’t have to install and run a restrictive program that limits your access to content you already paid for, unlike their rival distributor Valve and their Steam software. Once you’ve purchased and downloaded a game from GOG, it’s yours to do with as you see fit.
Besides excluding DRM from their products, the overwhelming majority of the games they sell range from $6 to $10. They also have seven free games available, hold weekly sales on parts of their catalog and have excellent customer service.
You can check them out at www.gog.com.
