Steam What on earth is SNEG? (Or how GOG.com quietly dropped out of self-publishing)

[Krvavi Abadas]

So, a couple of days ago. A press release was dropped revealing that the Dungeons & Dragons "Gold Box" games are coming to Steam in a few weeks.
What makes this unusual is that GOG had already brought these games back in 2015, completely self-published by them.

For those of you who were unaware, this was not their first attempt by buying up the publishing rights for various games. With both Pacific and Fantasy General predating the collection by about 3 months.
It was a rather smart idea at the time, considering the fickle nature of said rights occasionally causing them to fall into the hands of companies with zero interest in the gaming market. Such as the infamous incident where the System Shock IP was inexplicably owned by an Insurance company for several years before Nightdive bought it from them.

They picked up quite a few interesting titles over the coming months, from making the classic RTS title "War Wind" freeware to picking up various Warhammer licensed games.
Though this saga would turn out to be shortlived, as after War Wind and it's sequel were released on August 2016. No further titles were brought out.

So what happened? Looking into the press release gives us a clue.

“Even decades after their original release, the Gold Box games are seen by many as iconic Dungeons & Dragons digital experiences, and they practically defined computer RPGs, ” said Oleg Klapovskiy, Director at SNEG. “Now, I’m overjoyed that we get to fulfill our dream of bringing these RPG gems back to PC gamers on Steam while introducing them to a new audience!”

Oleg Klapovskiy had, according to my research. Joined CD Projekt in August 2008, and was quickly shifted to their then-new GOG division by January. With his tenure lasting all the way into 2020.
Viewing Sneg's list of Steam titles shows that the vast majority of them were previously self-published by GOG. Including both General and War Wind titles.


Looking into trademarks, GOG's trademark for Fantasy General was quietly shifted to SNEG around October-November 2021. Shortly after it was added to Steam.
And viewing the GOG pages for the Gold Box games shows that they were properly updated to add a SNEG copyright.

I also checked the files for War Wind as it's a free download. and noticed the icon used for the GOG version still exists in the Steam data. (The circle design is typical of titles on there.)

As for when SNEG arrived. It's naturally 2020, their first proper title was an enhanced re-release of "Diggles: The Myth of Fenris" on December 2020. Though a Q&A that was buried in the Gold Box press assets states he was planning it since the start of the year.

In early 2020 a friend of mine, Elena Roor (coming from the games services business), found
herself both on maternity leave and in lockdown. To keep it together, she came up with a side
project where she'd look for games that made her feel nostalgic and were, in her mind, the
“most technically broken” and try to bring them back to life. That game happened to be Diggles:
The Myth of Fenris. Soon after, I started helping Elena as an advisor and investor. One project
led to another and fast forward to Oct 2021 the company shaped to how we know it today with
three of us pushing it forward (Elena, Artem Shchuiko, my ex-colleague from GOG days, and
myself).

Outside of that game, they've also separately revived the Witchaven series, Siege of Avalon, and Blade of Darkness. With the latter two receiving the same fully enhanced treatment that Diggles got.

What's particularly baffling to me is the fact they have zero presence outside of Steam and GOG, you'd think they'd at least have some sort of website or something for info. But no. This is despite the fact they

1. Are working with a proper PR team, UberStrategist. Which is how i was eventually able to acquire that Q&A.
2. Those enhanced ports are developed by a decently established porting team, General Arcade.

Even Strangely Compelling Media, a similarly unknown studio that quietly localized ten different Kunio-Kun Famicom games alongside their usual work of localizing more recent games. Has a website and Twitter account.

TL;DR: GOG briefly experimented with buying the publishing rights to various retro games from 2015-2016, an employee there then decided to split off into making his own game preservation company in 2020, taking those IPs with him.

 

[Derachi]

super nintendo entertainment games

 

[Krvavi Abadas]

by Time Extension, naturally.
this is the first time the staff has ever spoken publicly. as there’s still no social media profiles tied to the studio.

Time Extension: How did SNEG start as a company?

Shchuiko: I’ve been working in games for quite some years, [going back to the late 2000s/early 2010s]. It was an era where Steam was obviously around but retail was still kind of a thing (though diminishing to an extent). So you could witness a lot of games being released physically and then just disappearing because nobody would bother to put them out on digital storefronts. Then around the same time, I ended up signing a publishing distribution deal for one of the classic games developed in Russia while working at another company.

The game was called Eador and it was supposed to be released on Steam and some other storefronts, so the creator [Alexey Bokulev] was looking for possible distribution options. That is when I first came across a storefront called GOG.com. I started talking to them and slowly this kind of thing came to me that there was something [special] about these classic games. I met somebody who was already doing something for them, and I signed a deal. Then long story short, I started working for GOG and spent the next seven or seven and a half years looking for old games and old content.

That’s kind of how it started and continued for quite some time, but then, you know, as you work at a big corporation, eventually you’re no longer doing just the thing you started with. It becomes more about things like corporate development, bigger deals, bigger objectives, and suddenly you’re not doing anything about the classic games – something that you were particularly interested in at the very beginning. but the funny story is that it wasn’t us who started the company; it was my wife (who is also in gaming).

She was pregnant with our son and she was like, ‘I’m a little bit bored and I’m about to jump into maternity leave, let me do some side projects.’ So she found the developer of a game that was not available anywhere. She signed a publishing deal. She figured out a team that could fix it and the game was released. That was all happening in front of me. So at some point, I decided you know, I just want to do the same thing. So I joined.

there’s a few other curious details brought up alongside the origin story, like the fact their excellent port of Chasm: The Rift was entirely rebuilt from scratch due to the source code being lost.