GOG Enters Publishing in Its New Post-CD Projekt Era With Several Games Already in Ontwikkeling

Cast your mind back to January and you might remember a sit-down we had with some of the leaders of a newly-independent GOG. The DRM-free storefront had separated from its former owner— CD Projekt —and returned to the arms of its original cofounder, Michał Kiciński. Back then, Kiciński told us that publishing was one of the several moves GOG was considering in its post-CDP life. Well, the day has finally come.

“Together with an independent publisher, Retrovibe, we’re joining forces to launch Retrovibe by GOG, a new initiative supporting independent developers in bringing their games to players across PC storefronts and consoles,” reads the announcement press release.

The publisher will do, well, publisher stuff. Funding, marketing, hobnobbing with content creators and game journalists (an unenviable task), and getting games certified for release on all of the good Lord’s wonderful platforms.

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Why has GOG signed up with Retrovibe in particular? Well, there’s an affinity between GOG’s focus on releasing and preserving old games (good old games, you might say) and Retrovibe’s focus on games that capture some sort of classic essence. But a big reason is that Retrovibe was also cofounded by Kiciński: in our January chat, he noted that he had a 50% stake in the publisher.

So it was probably a relatively easy marriage to make happen: “With GOG now under the ownership of its original co-founder, Michał Kiciński, who also co-founded Retrovibe, the two companies have an opportunity to work more closely together,” says the announcement, touting Retrovibe’s publishing nous and GOG’s “platform expertise, marketing capabilities and connection to PC players worldwide.”

The new publishing chimera already has a game under its stamp: Cop Bastard, which releases tomorrow, on 29 October. It has a very good name and a sort of “what if you equipped a John Woo protagonist with a bodycam” aesthetic. Our (formerly our) Robin Valentine wrote that there was “definitely something alluring about Cop Bastard’s brand of deep-fried retro weirdness” when he tried it last year, though he feared it might not hold up over a full playthrough.

Also on the GOG/Retrovibe docket is Project Warlock: Lost Chapters, the third in the Project Warlock line of boomer shooters. It’s not as good a name as Cop Bastard but it does have a great look to it.

You might notice that, despite officially being embraced into the GOG publishing bosom, both those games are not GOG-sclusives. They each have Steam pages as well as GOG releases, which I confess to being quite happy about, if for no other reason than GOG’s Galaxy client doesn’t yet have its promised Linux build.