After three years of peddling classics, Good Old Games has announced that it will begin offering newer titles. The service has grown over the last few years and as part of that expansion, it will ink deals with more partners to deliver modern games -- whether they're triple-A blockbusters or indie titles.
Kicking off its initiative, the store has posted Trine for $9.99 and The Whispered World for $14.99 -- $5 more than the store's previous maximum price of $9.99, but that is necessary for the service to broaden its horizons. Trine is priced equally with Steam, while The Whispered World is actually $5 cheaper.
GOG has also listed Legend of Grimrock for preorder at $11.99 (due April 11), while the next few months will bring more than 20 other titles including Spacechem, Machinarium and Darwinia. Although the site is striving to deliver more than classics, it promises to keep providing DRM-free games at fair prices.
While publishers have been flexible with back catalogs, it remains to be seen if they'll allow GOG to distribute modern releases without DRM. Speaking with GameSpot, managing director Guillaume Rambourg cited GOG's past success as proof that major firms are interested in selling unrestricted games.
Though counterintuitive at first, GOG plans to use DLC to deliver a strong value. Instead of selling the bits of content separately, the company wants to bundle all of it with the main game. "Again, our aim is to provide value for money to gamers so that they are happy to buy games from us," Rambourg said.
Considering GOG's library is primarily retro games, the service isn't considered a rival of Steam or other major distributors. Rambourg believes that will remain true, despite GOG's inclusion of modern titles. "As a matter of fact, I think that GOG.com is more of an alternative than a competitor," he said.
As part of its transition, Good Old Games has been renamed to simply "GOG" (presumably to deemphasize the "Old" part). This is how users have referred to the service for years, anyway. The company has also released an updated site with a cleaner layout and more focus on social networks.