GOG.com barely broke even in 2018 - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/65367/gog-com-barely-making-profit/index.html Today CDPR announced its annual report for 2018, confirming some alarming financial trends for its DRM-free games store. Due to higher promotional costs for its new game Thronebreaker and increased operational spending, GOG only made around 30,000 PLN of profit in 2018, or about $7,800 in current USD conversion rates. This development underlines GOG's recent layoffs due to underwhelming earnings. But GOG is still making pretty good revenues from PC game sales. In 2018, GOG generated 131.5 million PLN, or about $34 million, from games sold across the store."GOG has been growing successively year-on-year and selling more and more," said CD Projekt RED CFO Piotr Nielubowicz. The issue is how much it costs to keep GOG up and running across multiple territories: it spent 73% of the revenues it made during the year to deliver those games to consumers, or about 95.8 million PLN ($25 million). After operating costs are factored in (another 46 million PLN or $12 million) and taxes, GOG profits sat at a rather small 30,000 PLN.

As much as I dislike CDPR as developers, I try and support GOG where I can because its mission statement is completely unobjectionable and it's responsible for some of my most beloved games remaining in the public eye and remaining accessible, something I am regularly very worried about.

They don't deserve this shit. Gog demonstrates a flawlessly honest philosophy of just selling the game with zero bullshit as a plain exe if one so desires.

I'm curious, why? afaik they have a pristine track record for not being dicks

I don't think this is such a good idea after CDProjekt promised not to do this. Besides, Cyberpunk will inevitably sell like gangbusters on GOG anyway.

I have just never liked the games they've made. That, and CD Projekt Black, while short-lived, left a slightly sour taste in my mouth, though it's deadened over time. Nothing personal and I don't avoid them or anything, I just don't like their games. I'm picky.

It may have had a risk of starting a dangerous chain reaction with too many people doing exclusives everywhere all of a sudden.

I've said this so many times when someone brings up GOG in a list of competitors to Steam and what not, but I'm honestly not surprised by this news. Let me get this out of the way first. I love GOG as a platform. Having DRM free games is its single largest draw for me, and in some cases, I will gladly opt for a GOG version of a game over a Steam version simply for that reason. That being said, it's no secret that GOG requiring its games to have no DRM, on top of having a vastly smaller user base, is what turns publishers off from wanting to support the platform. Publishers like the idea of DRM, because they want at least some security on their investments and returns and want to hinder piracy as much as they can before it inevitably happens. On top of this, your average PC gamer actually doesn't care about DRM being in their games unless it's painfully obvious. Since just about everyone in the PC gaming world uses Steam anyway, and Steam allows the sale of games with DRM, why go through the hassle of supporting an extra storefront to appease a minority of users who would probably get it on Steam anyway if given no other choice while also making your game easier to pirate in the process? As indie games become more and more popular, this becomes true for indie devs as well. This also doesn't touch upon the inferior developer experience that GOG has when compared to Steam. Managing builds, branches, and content on GOG I've heard is pretty archaic when compared to how things are done on Steam, and more often than not, is the reason why GOG versions of games may sometimes be out of date in terms of patches for a bit or outright missing features entirely when conpared to the Steam release of a game. Also the community features are sorely lacking when compared to Steam, which is one of the reasons why GOG doesn't really have much of a solid and dedicated user base. GOG doesn't have anything like Steam Workshop, Community Hubs, etc. The most you have is a forum separate from the store itself. And yes, as much as everyone now hates this topic because of EGS, combine all the above with a 30/70 revenue split, and you can see probably the last reason why developers and publishers don't want to support GOG. Asking for your games to not have DRM, and then asking for a 30% cut are pills your average developer or publisher doesn't want to immediately swallow. They can swallow the same or slightly lower cuts that Steam offers because the audience is there as are the features, just as they can swallow the barebones nature of EGS compared to Steam because the cuts there are much lower combined with the massive amount of Fortnite players as potential customers. GOG doesn't really have anything enticing in comparison. It doesn't have a large audience or even large potential audience to offset the 30% cut requirement on top of requiring all games to have no DRM. In short, GOG is too consumer focused almost. It values the consumer so much that it can act as a hindrance towards developers and publishers who want to sell their games, requiring them to give up more than their willing on their properties to ensure consumers are as satisfied as possible. However, when discussing social features, it's not consumer focused enough as it lacks features compared to Steam in that department which results in its inability to maintain a userbase anywhere close to comparable to Steam's. If you give a consumer a choice between a Steam copy of a game, and a GOG copy, more often than not, they'll always opt for the Steam copy as that's the platform all of their games and friends are on. Ideally, a successful storefront is one that meets consumer and creator needs in the middle as much as possible, and until EGS improves its public image (if it ever does), Steam pretty much has that role on lockdown. It's fair to pretty much all parties on all sides.

GOG acts more like a "pay if you want" joint since they essentially serve as a release group for online piracy. No wonder they're struggling.

AFAIK, Good Old Downloads wasn't taken down because of legal action but because they were constantly being DDOS'd by other pirate sites, who were making ad dollars off their downloads, something GOD did not partake in. I think most people would buy games if they can afford it. Back when I had no disposable cash to speak of, I would pirate GOG installers all the time but now my library's only ~80 games short of my Steam account.

Never heard of them... https://files.catbox.moe/h8qsf9.png Oh. Oh dear god.

I never knew 34 million dollars of sales meant that nobody uses it. Seriously, the reason why gog doesn't make a profit is because of its expenses. The problem with gog is that it's way too big and thus has way too much upkeep in comparison to the revenue they make. The reason why they don't make more money is that gog mostly sells older games and has less cutting-edge mass appeal videogames on offer, meaning it will inherently have a lower customer base. Obviously with CDPR becoming a bigger name in gaming this is beneficial to gog but they will always be a lot more niche than steam or epic due to their more retro-oriented library. Don't defend DRM like an idiot, gog doesn't make gangbusters for other reasons.

What's funny about this statement is that the vast majority of torrents I have seen for newer games that have both Steam and GOG copies, it's always the Steam copy that's up for torrent. You pretty much have to dig for a GOG torrent. Not even pirates and crackers want to touch GOG it seems. Maybe it's an ethics thing (GOG supports no DRM so why damage their cause), or maybe it's a challenge thing (there's no cracking involved with GOG copies, and scene groups love removing or bypassing DRM). Maybe it's just a case of popularity, because I'm sure if GOG was more successful to the point of Steam, there would probably be GOG torrents everywhere. Part of me does wonder something though. If, in an alternate past, GOG took the same approach as Epic is now without being a dick (better revenue share), built up its community features close to Steam's, and paired that with no DRM for consumers, would developers and publishers bite? Would they be willing to risk their games not having DRM for a better share of the profits?

I guess this explains why they are ending the store credit on purchases where games are more expensive. Still disappointing, but more understandable now. I'll probably still get games from GOG over Steam when given the option.

I mean, you can also say that for virtually any good old game, they were cracked years ago and are extremely easy to pirate.

There are some pretty in-depth reports and accounts of employees that stated that the working conditions are rather horrible. Witcher 3 was quite an ordeal for most developers. Sure the game goes down now as one of the best rpgs of all time but at what cost. CDPR uses some awful practises, I need to find the sources again though to confirm it.

This is correct. I don't remember the exact site that was doing it but it was a "competing" site that DOX'd the people running GOD and kept DDOS'ing them.

The law of large capitalism is merciless. The good guys either get out of the competition or they get twisted towards evil (or ethically dubious practices, if you prefer). At the end of the day, big publishers would like to ideally cease amount of pirated executions to zero. If they could put "always online" requirement to all games, they would. This is why they're obsessed with "live services". Well, ideally, anyway. Not because they love to torture consumers with addictive bullshit but because they wanted to secure profits from all copies and MP games were deemed acceptable by the public to have an "always online" requirement. But once the genie was out of the bottle, the "live service" thing created a completely new avenue of whale mining so the industry switched to that rather than producing packaged works of entertainment. So I don't think that GOG, were they to pursue big publishers, could seduce them into having non-DRM releases for newer games. I just don't see it happening.

I mean, have you seen The Witcher 3's sales? I don't really think that's the case here man. AFAIK only P2P are really in for the piracy alone, cracking groups are all about sending greets, playing cool af chiptune all while speedrunning that crack.

Well, that settles it, I have to put my all into buying whatever I can from the GoG store.

Probably not in the current times, modern publishers just hate taking risks in general and even if GOG was the perfect platform they wouldnt release it just by the premise that it has no DRM I mean thats kinda why we have stuff like Denuvo even though Steam works as a DRM I could see indie developers publishing on GOG if your example was the case but everything above mid shelf devs (guys like THQ) I really cant imagine getting on GOG

"but but... greedy distributors stealing that 30% they don't deserve???" good to see some numbers on upkeep cost, or at least an estimation to its caliber.

There a reason that every store ask for 30% and why Epic's 12% is just part of their loss plan to gain marketshare.

But every developer wants it to be the new industry standard. We don't exactly know the viability of it.

That depends on a platform and how they earn. Valve are getting flak because they get a huge fuckton of money from Dota 2 and CSGO, while getting loads of money from Steam too. Epic takes a loss on that because there is no loss to take yet (because there is no need to hold forums and such for now) and because Fortnite earns a lot of money for them too.

Mist developers are terrible business men (and most publishers are too far in the hyper-capitalist mindset). I'm doing a project management module in my programming course and the small fictional company I had to plan out isn't getting anything close to 70% of the revenue of products sold, between distribution costs, supply costs, and the cut various stakeholders have to take. Game developers have it easy in the modern, digital era. Just throw the game up on a store with no physical production or shipping to worry about. If they want a bigger cut of the revenue they should host and sell all their games on their own websites, maybe they'd get some perspective on how expensive it is to run a store. Valve are making money hand over fist from steam but it is entirely deserved. GoG should be doing as well in an ideal world, hopefully the end of the fair price program and the release of Cyberpunk 2077 will get them healthily into the black, rather than bordering the red.

a majority of the people who crack games are absolutely doing it for the challenge. that's why there was the whole kerfuffle between skidrow and cpy over denuvo, because cpy wasn't making a "real" crack. i forget what they did, but it was some sort of spoof for the connection check.

If a platform is to be successful they have to be self sustainable and not depend on the revenue from another product, which EGS is not.

https://twitter.com/tomgvalve/status/1109261352390918145 Alone is a good example of how costs quickly eat into the % a digital store takes. I think it's totally fair that as a developer, don't have to worry about currency conversions, CDNs, friends lists, networking, etc. And in return Valve takes 25%.

If I remember correctly Epic doesn't include the payment costs into the store cut.