Downloadable Game Service Good Old Games Shut Down [Update]

Update: It may all be a hoax, details at the bottom of this post. Original article continues below.

This will put a damper on your Sunday afternoon. The service Good Old Games, a website where you could buy out-of-date and hard-to-find PC titles, has surprisingly shut its doors. This afternoon (12:00 EDT, if Wikipedia is anything to go by), the main site at GOG.com only shows a simple page explaining why the shutdown has occurred.

“We’ve debated for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form” says the GOG.com team. This is a shame; since the service launched in 2008, I myself have downloaded a fair share of games, from the original Fallouts to point-and-click adventure titles I would’ve never found anywhere else (like Beneath A Steel Sky). 223 games were available for download on the service (as of June 21st), but not anymore.

Looking at GOG’s Twitter account, on Friday the service tweeted “Sometimes it’s really hard being DRM-free… hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy :(”

This was probably the deciding factor in the site closing. Have you downloaded games on the service before this afternoon? Luckily the site says that some time this week “we’ll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games.”

It’s sad to see a great system like this shut down. GOG.com will surely be missed.

We’ve reached out to Good Old Games for more details and will update this post when we get them.

Update: GoG have got back to us saying:

As the message on the site says, this doesn’t mean GOG is gone :). We’ll have more to share in the coming days.

There’s also been mention On The Internet (NeoGAF, Reddit) that this is a marketing stunt and that investers were pre-warned about it a few days ago.