A Marketing Blunder: GOG Shuts Down and Then Restarts

It’s been a bit of a mad week for some gaming fans, one of the main digital distribution websites decided that it was shutting down by putting this message on their website:

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is,” it explained. “We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

This led too many people thinking the site was gone forever, and who wouldn’t? It clearly implies that things aren’t going well for the company and that they have had to reconsider how they are running their business.

The Problem – A Background of Good Old Games

Good Old Games is a service which sells older PC games. Many of the games are updated so that they can work on newer systems, of Windows. As well as this, GOG is known in the digital distribution market for not using any DRM (Digital Rights Management), meaning users can download the game without any additional software. The service was launched in 2008, so has been running for two years and over those two years it has built a cult following.

The Problem – Uproar

When the statement on the website was published, many people thought the service was gone for good. This meant that none of the users could download any of their games, meaning that the product they paid for wasn’t available. Obviously, this lead to unhappy customers.

The Problem – A Few Days Later

A few days later the truth came out, the statement below was posted with a video, take a look below:

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.

The Problem

What did all this mean then? Well, it means the PR and marketing departments didn’t do that great. They got probably 75% of their customers upset for no reason and also made many lose confidence in the company. So all in all, it doesn’t look like the company marketed themselves all that well.
On the other hand, websites all over the web have covered this story, meaning more exposure and ultimately more users flooding to their site, hopefully getting them more sales in the long run. They may have gained more users from this stunt then they lost, well at this stage they will crossing their fingers and hoping!

Why Have I done This Article?

What I wanted to get across in this article was that you have to be careful when choosing how to go about your marketing. GOG took this massive risk because they haven’t got a big marketing budget and doing this stunt was cheap, well probably free, and it allowed them to get some exposure. However it did backfire slightly, proving how difficult marketing is in modern times.

Think out all your actions when marketing a business.