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GOG is losing money and refocusing on ‘handpicked selection of games’

Bullet Club

Member

GOG is losing money and refocusing on ‘handpicked selection of games’​


It’s apparently transferring some developers

CD Projekt says its GOG games storefront will put more focus on offering “a handpicked selection of games” and transfer some developers to other projects, following ongoing financial losses at the division.

“Regarding GOG, its performance does present a challenge, and recently we’ve taken measures to improve its financial standing,” CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz told investors on a quarterly earnings call. “First and foremost, we’ve decided that GOG should focus more on its core business activity, which means offering a handpicked selection of games with its unique DRM-free philosophy. In line with this approach, there will be changes in the team structure.”

Nielubowicz said that some developers who’d been working on GOG’s online solutions will be transferred from the project. At the end of 2021, GOG is also leaving the Gwent consortium, a cross-division project related to CD Projekt’s The Witcher card game Gwent. This means it won’t bear any development costs or share any profits from the development consortium. CD Projekt previously called Gwent “the most important project of 2017 in the GOG.com segment.”

These latest statements came after disappointing financial results for GOG. The storefront saw a slight increase in revenue but a net loss of around $1.14 million in the last financial quarter. Overall, it’s lost about $2.21 million over the past three quarters compared to a $1.37 million profit over the same period in 2020. CD Projekt didn’t immediately reply to questions about how its new strategy might translate into changes to GOG’s features or catalog.

GOG launched in 2008 as Good Old Games, a platform built around selling hard-to-find classic games without digital rights management or DRM. Since then, it’s expanded into a more all-purpose storefront selling new third-party games and internal studio CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, plus an online service called GOG Galaxy. But it’s also faced apparent financial problems before, laying off a reported 10 percent of its staff in 2019.

One staff member tied the earlier layoffs to increased competition in PC gaming storefronts, which has driven major platforms to lower the commission they take from developers. Valve’s Steam service has long dominated the market for computer game sales. At least one recent competitor, the Epic Games Store, isn’t expected to turn a profit until 2024. And Epic’s store is cushioned by revenue from the publisher’s blockbuster game Fortnite and Unreal game engine. Meanwhile, CD Projekt Red’s botched 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077 has put a damper on its recent earnings — although the company says it has seen renewed enthusiasm for the game and is “on track” to release a delayed update in early 2022.

Source: The Verge
 

01011001

Banned
I already said it in another thread and I will say it again, AND I WILL NOT BE SWAYED FROM THIS OPINION

if a game is available on Steam and GOG, and you choose to buy on Steam... sincerely FUCK YOU :)
-The People That Care



Thats what happens with you offer games with full ownership.
People would distribute the games to other people.

this is purely an issue with people exclusively buying on steam, and nothing else. other storefronts have no chance and can only survive if they are like Epic and buy exclusives like crazy or are a big publisher that sells its games exclusively through the own storefront like Ubisoft

GoG, which has no exclusive deals and doesn't have exclusive CD Project games either has no chance in this market
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Maybe if GOG didnt have crazy 50-70% off deals for the same game every month they'd make some money. Many of the oldies arent even on Steam. So for gamers interested in classics, GOG doesn't have to bargain bin Heroes of M&M 3 to 75% off to $1.99 every month or two.

Amazingly, its not like digital storefronts even have to buy and store stacks of cases of inventory. It's all digital cuts. So their cost structure is running a website, servers, paying fees to allow credit cards, and all the staff to maintain it.

Guess the revenue is a lot smaller than I think it is on GOG.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
I mean, gog was made, did well & grew as Steam dominated as they have since the beginning (even though competitors like Stardock have always been coming and going, mostly going and for good reason). If any storefront had an impact on this and other smaller sellers then it must be a newer development like say, EGS taking all their visibility away, which by the way could be inferred from both statements in this very article and their previous huge news, where they said they'd stop providing customers their fair price package program in a futile attempt to lower the 30% cut they used to take (though I dunno if that actually went anywhere, it's clear where pressure for it came from), since Steam has just maintained business as usual so if they're the cause gog would have never been viable. It's also worth remembering gog shifted away from the good old games it thrived on, maybe they should have capitalized on that and if they then found they've exhausted the classic PC library (which they haven't mind) they could have moved to console & arcade libraries (outside first party stuff I suppose, unless they managed some sweet deals, which isn't impossible) and offering roms & isos with emulators (much like they do DOSBox and ScummVM based releases, this is a field with potential given many people get the classic collections just to access games legitimately in order to then run them in their own emulators of choice) rather than try and be just another store without (but at times with and other debacles) DRM and largely the same games as everywhere else, but far from all, or getting their own client going, or stop charging in $, or whatever else people never wanted from them. Oh well, good luck again, maybe they'll find a way.

Edit: TL;DR, Steam evil, Steam users evil, save us based Timmy as the shills claim in here even though many had seen the writing on the wall and predicted smaller stores like this would be affected the most by EGS bad business practices they cannot compete against without their own Fortnite...
 
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Tschumi

Member
I just got all the games i wanted from them. Their coupon emails didn't really get me to bite.. i like the idea of snobby quality over quantity, leave that to other services. I really care so little about all those indy/b-grade titles with fancy cover art concealing cereal box quality games. I'm there for legit retro titles.

The overwhelming majority of games I've bought on gog are ones that wouldn't run if i got them anywhere else, or for whatever reason weren't on steam. I can't remember the very first game i bought with gog, but it was almost certainly a retro game steam didn't have.

That's right, first game i got was Outcast, innovative 90s third person shooter.. then Caesar 3, Icewind dale 2, alpha Centauri, og ghost Recon.. at the time these games weren't on steam, or cost more
 
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TransTrender

Gold Member
I'm a staunch 'No Steam no buy' member but I have GoG because they were servicing a very different market with mostly old and forgotten DRM free versions of PC games.

Sucks to hear they are losing money. Is this because they were paying for big AAA releases? Figured that would also suck for their servers and force some upgrades since most games were under 1GB downloads and now they're like 60GB+.

I still only buy the old stuff so it's only a few bucks at a time.
 

jakinov

Member
Thats what happens with you offer games with full ownership.
People would distribute the games to other people.
people distribute the games regardless...

non-game devs are expensive and GoG doesn't get all the latest and greatest plus people like to buy games mostly on Steam. So you have low volume of sales (i.e. revenue) and relatively high costs.
 

JayK47

Member
I keep forgetting they exist and always mean to support them. But I have played old games and really do not have time for replays. If they ever get No One Lives Foreve, then I will buy.
 

lh032

I cry about Xbox and hate PlayStation.
people distribute the games regardless...

non-game devs are expensive and GoG doesn't get all the latest and greatest plus people like to buy games mostly on Steam. So you have low volume of sales (i.e. revenue) and relatively high costs.
there will be more people distributing games if it was allowed in the first place.
Its human nature.

Thats why console manufacturers put some sort of DRM on their digital/physical games.
 

Graciaus

Member
I use the launcher for the few drm free games I have to keep track of them. But I've never bought anything off their store and don't see the point.
 

jakinov

Member
there will be more people distributing games if it was allowed in the first place.
Its human nature.

Thats why console manufacturers put some sort of DRM on their digital/physical games.
if it was really an issue it would affect Steam sales of the same games too. The actual problem is low volumes of sales for the actual platform which is mainly due to Steam's dominance and lack of variety in games.
 

YCoCg

Member
It was more the slippery slope of working around the No DRM part and HITMAN was the straw that broke the camel's back. Putting up a game that requires an internet connection on a DRM Free store was bad enough, but their response was worse!

Pissing off your own customer base isn't the best tactic.
 

sn0man

Member
It's also worth remembering gog shifted away from the good old games it thrived on, maybe they should have capitalized on that and if they then found they've exhausted the classic PC library (which they haven't mind) they could have moved to the classic console libraries (outside first party stuff I suppose, unless they managed some sweet deals, which isn't impossible) and offering roms & isos with emulators (much like they do DOSBox and ScummVM based releases, this is a field with potential given many people get the classic collections just to access games legitimately in order to then run them in their own emulators of choice) rather than try and be just another store without (but at times with and other debacles) DRM and largely the same games as everywhere else, b
Yeah they lost focus recently and old console roms would have been amazing honestly.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Yeah they lost focus recently and old console roms would have been amazing honestly.
Yep, basically a PC Virtual Console & Arcade service would be great, even without the first party stuff, so long as they did it with the same care they used to have for the PC classics, by providing different variant versions of the roms and what not, originals and more recently translated ones, and having each in some portable preconfigured emulator package for casual users to easily launch and play it with in a modern OS/controller compatible way while still having the roms accessible for powers users that would just run it through RetroArch or whatever is their program of choice. If they had done it early they'd probably even have Capcom and Square get onboard easily before they started doing their own modern re-releases but given random small companies getting the rights for SFII home arcade machines and similar it's probably still doable. Maybe they'd have even shaped the future (now present) of retro re-releases for the better with going for authenticity, CRT filter options and so on instead of some garish remaster attempt some companies still stumble around with so every release is of a different quality level and feature set without standards.
 
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Drizzlehell

Banned
I always had a sneaky suspicion that people pirating GOG games instead of buying them from the storefront is a problem. This must be contributing to those financial losses to some degree.

At least when you had to deal with old fashioned repacks, cracked ISOs and other shady shit, the risks of infecting your computer with viruses or the hassle of fiddling around with mounted images and cracking the games yourself could serve as some sort of deterrent for pirates. But with GOG games, all you really have to do is torrent the installation file and run it. No risks, no fiddling around, just a DRM-free game that's incredibly easy to acquire and use. And there's nothing that GOG can really do about it, other than starting to copy protect their games but that's not an option because DRM-free is like their main selling point and it would be like a betrayal to their core customer base.
 

Fare thee well

Neophyte
Darn shame. I hope their quality over quantity plan works. I was also really hoping GoG Galaxy would take off more. Accessing all your games from one launcher/storefront is an awesome idea and maybe a way to battle multi-launcher fatigue. I do try to look at their catalogue first, but sadly a lot of the games I would pick don't show up there. Still I've gotten what I could from GoG.
 

Drew1440

Member
I always had a sneaky suspicion that people pirating GOG games instead of buying them from the storefront is a problem. This must be contributing to those financial losses to some degree.

At least when you had to deal with old fashioned repacks, cracked ISOs and other shady shit, the risks of infecting your computer with viruses or the hassle of fiddling around with mounted images and cracking the games yourself could serve as some sort of deterrent for pirates. But with GOG games, all you really have to do is torrent the installation file and run it. No risks, no fiddling around, just a DRM-free game that's incredibly easy to acquire and use. And there's nothing that GOG can really do about it, other than starting to copy protect their games but that's not an option because DRM-free is like their main selling point and it would be like a betrayal to their core customer base.
One option is to build a platform that goes beyond PC, like Steam did with SteamLink, Steam Controller - services that integrate with the Stream client. A lot of people prefer purchasing from Steam since they benefit from remote playing their games through the Steam client.

I do prefer buying old titles through GoG, since I can download them and transfer to my old Windows 98/XP gaming rig without any issues.
 

ShadowNate

Member
They managed to alienate their own customer base. The Hitman release debacle was kind of the last drop, but they did try to shift out of their basic business model (good old games), be Steam (ambitious Galaxy client, underdeveloped, slow-slaggish, underdelivering on promises, introducing two "gears" for game updates, no Linux version), terrible review system (no edits, minimal filtering), very buggy and unfriendly forums (unusable search, popups to post new message, notifications that won't go away, few moderators, bad report system), understaffed support team.

They also caved to mobs (Devotion debacle), and their parent company botched the Cyberpunk release... Before that it was mobs and idiots being outraged by GOG twitter (also idiotic tweets, but nothing to justify the outrage bullshit), delisting games only to bring them back sometimes in worse packages (not GOG's fault, but the customers probably won't care to know that), integrating the Epic Store purchases in their Galaxy client, and the old marketing stunt of course where they shut down the store for a week with essentially a "thanks for all the fish" message.....

What they offer, when they offer it without issues, and with care, is still good. Drm-free releases, classic games that can run on modern platforms or even platforms they weren't originally designed to run, is a great thing and I still will prefer to purchase such releases there.

But even those releases sometimes have issues of their own. Some are not sufficiently tested, won't run on Windows 10, don't include important manuals, or their "good" version(s) is not the one released, rather than a bad port or a remaster or a "newer" version.

I wish they find again and keep their unique place in the market. But they'll probably have to put way more effort on the store, cut down on their scope and go back to their original values/model.
 
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I already said it in another thread and I will say it again, AND I WILL NOT BE SWAYED FROM THIS OPINION

if a game is available on Steam and GOG, and you choose to buy on Steam... sincerely FUCK YOU :)
-The People That Care
Lmao how about, fuck you instead?

What kind of small minded bs am I reading here?

Do you even know how GOG operates when it comes to those living in third world countries? I bet you dont.

GOG is expensive AF outside of Western nations, and that is enough for many games outside of that region to look at it as absolutely trash.

Talk shit about Steam all you want, but Steam saved PC gaming on a WORLD WIDE LEVEL with its affordable prices for its many regions and not once have I felt like the price of a game is unreasonable living in a country where $1 is 4 times the value of the local currency.

These kind of takes are so dumb, so small minded, and only paints you as a person who fails to see the bigger picture.

GOG is great for what it is, but you need to accommodate the other regions in the world if you want to achieve success as steam did.
 

jigglet

Banned
I was really on board with GoG, thinking they were going to be an outlet for independent content, then they started censoring those games from Hong Kong devs. At that point, they were no better than any of the other major distribution channels that were pandering to China. Why wouldn't I just stick to Steam, then? I haven't bought a game from them since then.
 

ToTTenTranz

Banned
Last Christmas a friend wanted to give me Cyberpunk. The obvious choice was to give me the game through GoG because all the money would go to CDP.
He tried for hours to find a way to gift the game to me. Eventually he couldn't be bothered so he gave it to me through Steam instead.


It's also probably really hard to maintain a storefront and distribution service for DRM-less games that ends being made up of Witcher, Cyberpunk, indies and a bunch of older games whose sales are now residual.
 

bender

What time is it?
It's hard to imagine GoG not being profitable. Instead of creating Galaxy and trying to compete with Steam by offering the latest and greatest games, they should have stayed in their lane and offered good old games not found on other services.
 
i like gog and also the galaxy client but i do think they would be better ditching it and stop trying to compete with steam. they did a good job trying but it's not working out. stick to what you do best and just keep a store for old classics and your own games (cyberpunk/witcher etc)
 
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Interfectum

Member
I already said it in another thread and I will say it again, AND I WILL NOT BE SWAYED FROM THIS OPINION

if a game is available on Steam and GOG, and you choose to buy on Steam... sincerely FUCK YOU :)
-The People That Care





this is purely an issue with people exclusively buying on steam, and nothing else. other storefronts have no chance and can only survive if they are like Epic and buy exclusives like crazy or are a big publisher that sells its games exclusively through the own storefront like Ubisoft

GoG, which has no exclusive deals and doesn't have exclusive CD Project games either has no chance in this market
Nah fuck you and fuck GOG.
mister rogers middle finger GIF
 

Soodanim

Member
I like GOG and buy from there. Obviously it’s great for retro games. What’s not as good is when newer games don’t get patches or features that Steam gets, so it hurts their chances.

They’ll be much better off sticking to their lane and remembering why they’re unique. Whichever managers decided they should try to expand absolutely flopped, he should be who really gets the sack.

Older games with modern OS support, and maybe even games just a few years old at a cheaper price without DRM. Publishers won’t be so upset about no DRM when then majority of sales have tapered off, and users will be happy. Simple, effective.
 

GymWolf

Member
They have some of the worse prices\offers for single games, maybe fix that you wanna make money.

I forgot the last time i bough something from them, steam tribality has nothing to do with that, at least in my case.
 
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Paasei

Member
Why? I'd rather have all of my games in the same place. Cracks exist, if DRM ever becomes an issue. Torrent sites have every game ever made if anything gets taken down.
I never understood this reason very well. Unless all of you only buy games that require 1 launcher, then I do.

Let me explain why: If I buy a game, for example, RDR2 on Steam. I have it Steam, right? However, as soon as I install the game it also tells me to install R* launcher. Why? Now I have 2 launchers that are necessary for 1 game. If I would purchase it on R*, then I do not need Steam to also run in the background.

That is something I hate about having launchers as a whole, and am against it if given the option. If I have to choose between X-Launcher or none at all, I would always choose the latter.

GoG is never required, so that is the choice for me if I have it.
 

Holammer

Member
One of GOG's many problem is the curated nature of the store.
Publishing a game on Steam comes with zero friction and only costs 100$. On GOG there's no fee, but you need to apply and they are very likely to reject the application, if they don't think the game is a good fit for GOG. Which is all the time and rejection rates are so bad, devs don't even bother with the process anymore.
Even the chucklenuts that used to spam Steam forums for GOG versions figured this out and stopped.

As OP suggested, they're going to dig in even harder on this. Good luck.
 

darkangel-212559

Dreamcast Love
Fuck GOG they bowed down to China and removed that Taiwan horror game off their store front. Fucking China cock sucking scum bags. Any company that works with a disgusting Govement such as China should not be supported.
 
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horkrux

Member
I mean, gog was made, did well & grew as Steam dominated as they have since the beginning (even though competitors like Stardock have always been coming and going, mostly going and for good reason). If any storefront had an impact on this and other smaller sellers then it must be a newer development like say, EGS taking all their visibility away, which by the way could be inferred from both statements in this very article and their previous huge news, where they said they'd stop providing customers their fair price package program in a futile attempt to lower the 30% cut they used to take (though I dunno if that actually went anywhere, it's clear where pressure for it came from), since Steam has just maintained business as usual so if they're the cause gog would have never been viable. It's also worth remembering gog shifted away from the good old games it thrived on, maybe they should have capitalized on that and if they then found they've exhausted the classic PC library (which they haven't mind) they could have moved to console & arcade libraries (outside first party stuff I suppose, unless they managed some sweet deals, which isn't impossible) and offering roms & isos with emulators (much like they do DOSBox and ScummVM based releases, this is a field with potential given many people get the classic collections just to access games legitimately in order to then run them in their own emulators of choice) rather than try and be just another store without (but at times with and other debacles) DRM and largely the same games as everywhere else, but far from all, or getting their own client going, or stop charging in $, or whatever else people never wanted from them. Oh well, good luck again, maybe they'll find a way.

Edit: TL;DR, Steam evil, Steam users evil, save us based Timmy as the shills claim in here even though many had seen the writing on the wall and predicted smaller stores like this would be affected the most by EGS bad business practices they cannot compete against without their own Fortnite...

so you suggest they should have "shifted away" from one licencing hell to an even worse one

lol

they've never stopped adding old games, so it's not like people adamant to only buy old games on there were suddenly worse off
I feel like they could've done more to improve the out-of-the-box experience, since many games are just sold semi-broken, but they are probably too understaffed for this and there would've been very little gain.
 
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