This is the only line I was looking for. I stopped buying on Steam sometime ago because I realized I was just renting licenses. GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually own the product. As long as offline installers remain a core tenet, I don't care who owns the company. That said, it helps that it's someone returning to their roots rather than a private equity firm looking to strip-mine the assets.
OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own.
I love GoG and I have worked closely with a lot of people there on projects they are great. This announcement seems like good news.
No one has to sell games on Steam. No one has to use a model where they "rent licenses". They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact.
There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more.
Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.
It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business.
I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now.
A few bucks cost much less to me these days than a headache with finding cracked version and installing malware on your computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers.
Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
Given how many games on Steam are sold either DRM free (you can just transfer the files over to another PC and they just work) or functionally DRM free (Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, so one step removed from DRM free), this doesn't really scan. Other than games with Denuvo and multiplayer games, DRM is a non-issue for actual pirates.
It seems a lot more likely to me that the people in charge will have a fit at the idea of releasing the games DRM free, but don't actually care to know anything about the details. So long as the DRM checkbox is ticked, and they don't know about the fact that Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, everybody mostly gets what they want.
People only pirate games because the publishers make it too painful to play games legally. I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. This pattern has been shown time and time again. When people pirate, it's usually due to a problem with the experience. People pay for convenience.
Now a days a lot of people are pirating games because the quality of games has gone down the drain. Publishers are releasing unfinished games and pricing them at record high. Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.
I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.
For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters.
For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).
For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.
> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).
“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.
And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.
The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from third world countries that pirate for financial reasons just would not buy those games regardless. I'm unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to any meaningful degree.
When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.
Research from the University of Amsterdam’s IViR “Global Online Piracy Study” (survey of nearly 35,000 respondents across 13 countries) found that for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally, and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non‑pirating legal users.
Fun fact, this study was financed by YouTube to create a legal shield.
In 2017/2018, they were in the position where MPAA and RIAA were saying: "Piracy costs us billions; Google must pay" + they had European Parliament on their ass.
Google financed that 'independent' study to support the view
"Piracy is not harmful and encourages legal spend".
So the credibility of "independent" studies, is something to consider very carefully.
My real world observations agree with the direction of the study, so I don’t entirely dismiss it as fake based on its funding source.
I am cautious about the conclusion, though. It seems clear there is a spectrum from “unscrupulously pirate everything” to “consume legitimately after pirated discovery”, and quantification is necessary.
Before it was really expensive and difficult to get access to movies or music. Then came Netflix or Spotify. So money is the primary discriminator now, not access. And users without money would not bring revenue anyway
No they don't. I am tired of this feel good nonsense. I pirated games because it was free and I did not want to pay $60.
Just make your games a donation model if you really believe this. Or lets put up a version of Steam where all the games are free cracked copies of the game and see how it affects sales.
People pay precisely because they dont want to deal with the hassle pf pirating
I can pirate games easily, but I buy them on Steam because it's more convenient. If it's too expensive for me, I just never play it (or wait for a deal). I can't be bothered dealing with the installers and the potential viruses and the hassle.
I’m fabulously wealthy and still mostly pirate things just because I can’t be bothered dealing with online credit card payments.
Half the time I try to sign up for any of these services I get blocked for fraud because I’m in one country, my billing address in another and my bank in a third. Oh, and when something does work, it only works for a while until they lock the whole account with a bunch of paid content on it.
Yes, now imagine if we just removed the barrier to piracy completely. An easy to use client just like Steam, except all the games are free cracked copies.
people are commenting in this HN thread like piracy hasn't been thought about, deeply, by many thousands of people for ages in the games industry. i could link to numerous people writing very wise things about it - the CEO of a certain competitor to GOG and Steam comes to mind, he basically wrote the Luther thesis on games piracy - but then i'd be downvoted.
> They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
Depends on the game and DRM. Nowadays I buy all of my games (a little bit safer than running who knows what on my PC), but when I didn't have a job or money I used to pirate a lot - most DRM protected games would eventually be cracked and made available regardless. If an uncrackable DRM was in place, I wouldn't buy the game - I just wouldn't play it. Depending on the mindset, the same logic applies to someone with money, they might never be a customer regardless of whether it can or cannot be pirated, especially for games that never go on big discounts and sales. I say that as someone who by now owns about ~1000 games in total legally (though mostly smaller indie titles acquired over a lot of years and sales).
The good online stores at least make the act of purchasing and installing games equally if not more convenient than pirating them - something all of those streaming companies that crank up their subscription prices and want to introduce ads would also do well to remember. I like Steam the best because it's a convenient experience, the Workshop mod support is nice, as well as Proton on Linux and even being able to run some games on my Mac, just download and run. I think the last games I pirated were to check if they'd run well on my VR headset, because I didn't want to spend a few hours tweaking graphics settings and messing around just to be denied a refund - in the end they didn't run well, so I didn't play or buy them, oh well.
Also, despite me somewhat doubting the efficacy of DRM (maybe it's good to have around the release time to motivate legit sales, but it's not like it's gonna solve piracy), it better at least be implemented well - otherwise you either get performance issues, or crap that also happens with gaming on Linux with anti-cheat, where you cannot even give the companies money because they can't be bothered to support your platform. Even worse when games depend on a server component for something that you don't actually need for playing the game on your own, fuck that. It's like the big corpos sometimes add Denuvo to their games and then are surprised why people are review bombing them.
Piracy is widespread, that's undeniable. The question that industry groups and lawmakers love to avoid or lie about however is how much of that piracy represents lost sales, and how much represents people in the third world finding a way to participate with all of the people who can afford it. I pirated a lot as a kid because I had no money, there were no lost sales there. As an adult I don't pirate at all, because I have money, because it's inconvenient now compared to legitimate access.
So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Steam is a good option (I personally love it), and frankly if the worst happens and the games I pay for go away on Steam... there are options. Once I pay for something I no longer feel any guilt about seeking a backup for example, and neither should you, even if the industry groups count that as a full-sale price theft.
Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership Of corse, practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers, so its much better to use GoG if you care about this.
The reason they also do this is because of copyright, the license allows games to forbid you from redistribution more copies
If Im wrong about this please let me know, I read some articles claiming this is the case but I am not sure if they truly were correct.
>practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers
Well it makes it hard or impossible to sell your copy of the game to someone else after you are done with it like we used to be able to do with console game discs and cartridges?
Seems like a pretty big and practical difference to me.
You can also buy boxed things and have the problem. For example FL Studio, you buy the boxed edition 300 USD, and all you get is a serial number. Once it's linked to an account, it's over (and it's actually the only way).
If legislators want to do something good, they could force platforms to allow transfer of games between accounts.
Doesn't this fly in the face of Vernor vs Autodesk and other lwgal precedent? Not that they can't change this, but legislators have a vested interest in protecting software rights
Yes but if you set up a website to do this they could sue, which I think is reasonable as many if not most people would be happy to both sell and keep a copy
I think the only value it adds is cloud saves. The UI is otherwise the worst way to explore your library or the store, crawls to death performance-wise and isn't even a good UX in principle.
For example, if you're on page X of a search, click on a game, and go back, guess where that takes you? Yup, page 0 baby, going to have to click next X times again (there is also only previous and next; you can't fast-jump.) There are many more examples like that, I have filed survey responses several times on issues like this.
The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup. Currently that relationship flows in the other direction, which I always found odd: Lutris integrates GOG (and Steam) games in its UI.
> The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup.
Heroic Launcher can download the game files for you and any dependencies, including Wine/Proton/etc. You basically install the launcher (can be available from your distro's repository), use your GOG login in the app and it shows your library. Then click install and it'll download the files locally and after that you play the game. The experience is more or less the same like in Steam, at least as far as downloading and playing games is concerned.
I normally download the offline installers and use them with UMU Launcher (which is Proton without Steam, mainly meant to be used as a backend for projects like Lutris, Heroic, etc but you can use it directly from the command-line) but i just tried Heroic Launcher and all i had to do was run it, enter my GOG login and after it downloaded my library info, i was able to download and play a game the same way as in Steam.
I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add here TBH.
> Is GOG financially unstable? No. GOG is stable and has had a really encouraging year. In fact, we’ve seen more enthusiasm from gamers towards our mission than ever before.
I'm really happy to hear this, as I always feared their hard stance on no-DRM would scare off publishers and developers, but seems that fear might have been overstated. This year I personally also started buying more games on GOG than Steam, even when they were available on Stream. Prior to 2025 I almost exclusively used Steam unless it wasn't available there, but now GOG is #1 :)
Glad it's moving in even better directions, thank you Team GOG!
Companies with strong financial performance don't tend to use words like "encouraging". That is the language you get from companies that are in trouble and hoping for recovery.
Talking about people's enthusiasm for their mission is just straight up dodging the question itself.
I'm not sure I understand your figures. What is "32 thousand PLN", surely their entire annual profit for all of 2024 was not literally 32K PLN (approx. 9K USD)? Is this measured in millions? And whatever they're measured in, surely 32K to 910K in the span of a year is considered excellent progress?
No it was actually just circa 9 thousand Euros from GOG.COM. And it seems there was period of having potential loss of million PLN as well in Q3 of 2024 I think. So it looks quite variable based on which products release.
I think reality is that being game retailer is harsh market if you are anyone else but Valve with Steam. Selling copies redeemed on Steam is workable, but seeing that pretty much all big publishers are back on Steam should tell a lot of state of the market. And GOG has bigger mind share than actual market share.
> Consolidated net earnings during the reporting period stood at 193 million PLN – 2.5 times more than during the corresponding period of the previous year, which results in a net profitability of 55%.
Maybe I don't understand "profits above all" sufficiently well as some of my peers, but that seems Good Enough to me.
I guess I trust them that if they would be in trouble, they'd say so, not say "GOG is stable". But I've been wrong before, could be in this situation too, I guess I'm more hoping that they wouldn't lie to their users in their face like that.
I always search GOG before Steam. It’s slightly less user friendly in the most minor ways and sometimes a bit more expensive. But getting DRM free games is worth every penny and extra few moments. Steam is really great for what it is but you’re not buying games you’re leasing them. Excited to hear GOG might get more focus and investment.
Counterpoint, the cost of "owning" offline games is not zero and their lifetime is not infinite.
I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting them to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck. (In fact, for nearly all that I care about I also have bought a Steam license in addition).
Ultimately, everything comes down to user experience. We can pat ourselves on the back for buying something forever, but experiences and the media they are stored on are both transitory.
Which is basically never. They have no incentive to do that except for extreme circumstances, and they have all the leverage in the world over game publishers.
Delisted games tend to stay in your library for redownload.
I never understood the cynicism for digital media, it’s been multiple decades now and the model clearly works.
Obviously I prefer zero DRM but it’s also not a hard line requirement for me personally.
All of this is based on the assumption that the way it was done is the way it will be done.
Who will own and run Steam 30 years from now? Gabe Newell will be long-gone, his nepobaby next-CEO will be closing in on retirement if they don't check-out early to enjoy their vast wealth like Gabe has done.
What does Steam look like 60 years from now? Adults using it today are mostly dead and all of their licenses revoked forever, the games removed from circulation gone forever because nobody can ever have a license to use them again. They might be onto their 4th, 5th or 6th CEO by then, half a century removed from Gabe and any expectations we have around the ways he did things.
There's a lot of room for improvement securing some sort of legacy for Steam.
I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20 or whatever OS will be the dominant for PC in 30 or 60 years time.
> I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20
Given the lengths the Windows development team has gone to, to preserve backward compatibility, to the point that there was individual-game-specific workarounds codified in Windows, makes this claim the same as the GP’s, that Steam will change 30-60 years from now.
If it works on WINE today, I would expect it to work on WINE tomorrow. Worst case, you can probably just install an older WINE on a newer OS to ensure it.
They can't control the licenses rights for some assets like music that can expire and become undistributable. You may not know it until you install them on a new computer n years from now.
At least with Valve we can hope its gonna be okay for 4 reasons:
1. Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more time on his other projects.
2. Flat structure and and a small team. I know few people who has worked at Valve and while there are some downsides company of ~400 employees with a lot of internal power play is just more resilient than normal corporation. Many of people on the team are just rich enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.
3. From what is publicly known Valve is family owned basically since Gabe own major part of company. And while a lot of people would hate example of e.g Ubisoft its good example how family controlled business often sink before selling out.
4. It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control from the team without destroying both company and gaming community goodwill.
Yet I fully agree that Valve just like other company can be sold off just for userbase and run to the ground.
Valve just have better chance to stay customer friendly than your overall VC/PE/BlackRock owned corporation with 10,000 employees and 50 for-hire top managers / board directors.
Physical media rots too. I don't watch my DVD collection anymore because I don't have access to a working DVD player, but I've read that a lot of those discs don't play anymore because the publishers cheaped out on materials when they minted the discs.
Ever bought anything from MSN Music? Yahoo Music? Desura? Microsoft eBook Store? Walmart MP3s? Anything using Adobe Content Server? MusicNet? CinemaNow? UltraViolet?
It is laughable to think that digital media "clearly works". Companies shut down and stores shutter all the time. In most cases there is no recourse for customers, because – surprise – you didn't actually own the rights to what you bought, just a revocable license. You have to be pretty young and/or naive to think that this can't eventually happen to Steam as well.
And even if you fully trust Steam to stick around and keep its word, digital licensing means you can still get screwed. For example - if the publisher's license to in-game music expires, the game will automatically be updated to remove all the tracks (e.g. GTA Vice City and San Andreas). For larger issues and conflicts the game might be removed entirely (e.g. Spec Ops: The Line). Or the publisher might decide to just switch off the DRM servers, even for single player games (e.g. The Crew). Outside of gaming there are countless examples of publishers "upgrading" music tracks you own to different versions or censoring/altering content of books you own.
The only recourse to all this is to buy and store DRM-free versions of your media.
Which is the same as what can happen to GOG if you don't have the files backed up. And if you do happen to have them backed up, is there such a large difference between having the installer vs the full game installation stored?
Yes there is a difference. Steam sells you a license that can be revoked at any time. The games have DRM, and rely on cloud servers to authenticate you. If you turn your internet off they will all stop working after a certain period, even if fully downloaded. And if Steam or the DRM owner goes out of business you will end up with nothing.
If you buy and download something from GOG, it is yours. You can still play it in the next millenium as long as you have suitable hardware or an emulator.
This is true but you don't know ahead of time before you buy a game, you have to gamble on it being the case or not (i've found that while some lists exist in places like pcgamingwiki, they tend to be both very incomplete and often wrong).
Usually indie games tend to be DRM-free though, so if an indie game isn't available on GOG or Zoom Platform (another DRM-free store), i end up buying on Steam.
How is GOG functionally different from Steam? They're still just a middle man. For actual DRM-free software, both GOG and Steam are nothing more than a convenience layer. If they're anything more than that, the software simply isn't DRM-free.
Compared to Steam directly, yeah, sometimes a bit more expensive. But as soon as you go to sites selling steam keys (proper ones, not resellers), it's "almost always, a lot", as steam itself rarely has good prices. Now that might still be worth it, but it's relevant
> But as soon as you go to sites selling steam keys (proper ones, not resellers),
What is a company/individual if not a reseller if they're selling Steam keys? You cannot sell Steam keys without being Steam or the developer itself, and not be called a "reseller". Or what sites are you referring to here, stuff like Humble Bundle where you get Steam keys with the bundles?
Resellers sell something they bought. Or that's the idea. The sites are marketplaces, sometimes having people sell keys from different countries, sometimes stolen credit card keys. There are several game devs saying they'd prefer people pirating over using those sites.
Real stores sell steam keys because they are selling directly from the developers. Steam is actually nice (or preempting monopoly talk, depending on your view) in that it allows that (I think there are limits, but IIRC rather generous)
> Real stores sell steam keys because they are selling directly from the developers
And how did these "real stores" get those Steam keys unless they bought them, maybe even directly from the developers? Or are you saying game developers hand out these keys for free to the store, then the store sends the developer money for each key they sell? I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense.
What is an example of one such site selling Steam keys who you wouldn't consider a reseller?
It was "good old games", then they announced that good old games was going away and after everyone panic-downloaded their whole collection they announced that they weren't going anywhere but they were just going to be GOG without it standing for anything.
I used to love gog. I purchased a bunch of stuff back when they were talking a big game around supporting Linux with their Galaxy client.
But while gog was talking, Valve was actually doing. Building an actual Linux client. Making multiplayer actually work. Not to mention all the work they've done with Proton and upstreamimg graphics drivers.
I hope gog succeeds. I just value Linux gaming support over not having DRM. It's kinda a idealist vs realist stance for me.
There are tons of Linux games distributed on GOG, and not having to use a proprietary client is one of its great advantages. Not to downplay Valve's contributions (and I may well get a Steam Frame when they come out), but they mostly amount to porting their mandatory DRM-laden client to Linux, and maintaining a fork of Wine that integrates with that client.
Ownership, control, and privacy are among the main reasons I use Linux, and are likewise huge advantages that GOG has over Steam.
Official Linux releases are almost never maintained. I have the same game on Steam and GOG, but the GOG version no longer works. Neither does the Steam version, except if I switch to the Windows version with Proton. Then it works flawlessly (usually faster and better than the Linux version ever did.)
There is only 1 Steam client for Linux, and there will only ever be one client, and that client has had basic issues (context menus being a completely new window that steals focus, comes to mind instantly) that have been unresolved year after year.
For GOG, there are plenty of clients for Linux [1][2][3][4], And they are open source, I can go and talk to the people making these clients directly, I can give feedback, I can make changes to make these clients better (and to a small degree, I already have).
Con 1: not all options are all that easy to use or feature complete, making the "choice" a mandatory QA/research task, rather than a way to exercise personal taste/freedom
Con 2: no galaxy-only features like achievements and save file cloud sync
The unfortunate or fortunate reality of network effects also means Steam is usually best suited to preserve content that might otherwise be lost. Both in terms of literally holding the data for longer than the general public (including workshop files), but also by keeping communities active and alive.
I think it's perfectly realistic to think there is a substantial risk of losing library content you've bought on Valve in the next 20 years. Don't know what the odds are, but they're greater than zero.
It doesn’t look like GOG can afford to pay for that work. I think we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able to invest in Linux.
Valve started to invest in Linux and open source 10 years before releasing Steam Deck. They started hiring OSS developers back in 2012 and Deck released in 2022:
It is great because game preservation isn't what game industry shareholders usually interested.
CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.
I don't think it's fair to call Cyberpunk 2077 a colossal flop. It had an awful release, but the company stood behind it and fixed everything that needed fixing. Five years later it is now an acclaimed game that sold 35 million copies.
Yup, Cyberpunk 2077 has sold more copies in the same time frame than Witcher 3, which is routinely highlighted as one of the best and most successful games of all time.
You have to give kudos to CD PROJEKT for not just abandoning the game after a bad launch (which is what every other major studio would have done in its place) but patiently fixing problems and constantly adding content over 5 years to get to the state it is in today. And the game has no online requirement, no multiplayer, no microtransactions. Just one paid expansion which added a ton of new content. Rare to see this behavior in the industry today.
Studious dont abandon failed releases because they are evil. Its just releases fail because they run out of money so there just nothing to burn to save them.
CDPR just was lucky enough to make enough money of failed release to fix it. Most companies get no chance to do it.
EA is notorious for throwing games out there and abandoning them as soon as they don't turn out to be massive hits. That is a company that has plenty of resources to support the games and fix the bugs.
> which is what every other major studio would have done in its place
Afaik CDPR doesn't make many games. If one flops, that might be the end of them. I don't see abandoning a game as a valid option for them from a financial perspective. Makes much more sense to fix the issues and sell more.
What game was a colossal flop? Cyberpunk was released too early but they kept on delivering patches and then the players game. It's their highest earning title.
IIRC they fixed various bugs but they didn't fix the broken promises. The biggest problems with Cyberpunk were architectural, things that would basically require redesigning the game to match what was promised.
Online sentiment has drastically changed about how bad those broken promises were - a near-complete turnaround, similar to what happened with No Man's Sky. Basically from when the DLC was released, most people started feeling that they fulfilled the essence of everything that was promised.
IMO Cyberpunk is fundamentally not the game their marketing promissed. They marketed it as actually non-linear RPG and beyond very beginning of the game they just could't deliver on it.
After tons of patches and DLCs its just became a very very good game. Just not what was promissed.
> he believes GOG’s approach is more relevant than ever: no lock-in, no forced platforms, sense of ownership
I really hope that we'll be freed from the forced Windows platform. Sure, you can download and install GOG games today using a third-party client, but it'll never be as good as official support. There's also the issue of syncing saved games and achievements, not to mention the additional friction for less tech-savvy users.
TBH Heroic Launcher isn't particularly hard to get. Just download and run the AppImage file from their site, login to your GOG account and it'll download any dependencies automatically.
It isn't any harder to use Heroic Launcher than it is to use Steam and some distros have both in their repositories.
>Pursuant to the Purchase Agreement, on 31 December 2025 Michał Kiciński will acquire from the Company 2715 shares in GOG, i.e. 100% of the shares in GOG representing 100% of the votes at the shareholders’ meeting of GOG, for a price of PLN 90,695,440.00
>In accordance with the arrangements of the parties to the Transaction, prior to the execution of the Purchase Agreement, an amount of PLN 44,200,000.00 (forty-four million two hundred thousand zlotys 00/100) was paid out to the Company as distribution of due – as the Company was thus the sole shareholder of GOG – profits of GOG from previous years.
90 million PLN being ~21,5 million euros. Seems like some money was also held there.
Does anyone know the backstory here? Is CDprojekt not the right owner anymore? I am clearly not following the ownership closely here ( but maybe I should have ).
> Selling GOG fits CD PROJEKT’s long-term strategy. CD PROJEKT wants to focus its full attention on creating top-quality RPGs and providing our fans with other forms of entertainment based on our brands. This deal lets CD PROJEKT keep that focus, while GOG gets stronger backing to pursue its own mission.
> What is GOG's position in this?
> To us at GOG, this feels like the best way to accelerate what is unique about GOG. Michał Kiciński is one of the people who created GOG around a simple idea: bring classic games back, and make sure that once you purchase a game, you have control over it forever. With him acquiring GOG, we keep long-term backing that is aligned with our values: freedom, independence, control, and making games stay playable over time.
I've spent hundreds of hours on the GOG version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Every community recommends the GOG version over the Steam HD one. I didn't think how important GOG was to me, but now I'm going to find that patron program they're talking about. It would be great if in 30 years I can still play Master of Magic and that won't happen by itself.
I picked up a bargain bin CD ROM of this game in 1996 and it works under dosbox as well as it ever did. Which is to say mostly ok but sometimes hilariously crashy. I think what needs to happen for us to spend another 30 years crafting overpowered plate mail is for there to continue being good emulators for the mid 90s DOS environment.
I suspect this has been in a vague planning stage for the last few years, as various integrations between GOG and CD PROJEKT RED were slowly dismantled over that time (I particularly recall a GWENT account migration away from GOG).
Also, I guess this is as good a place as any to plug my GOG game discovery service and price tracker: https://gamesieve.com/ - basically a more full-featured way to explore GOG's catalog.
Please release a Linux client or, even better, officially support and invest in developing Heroic Games Launcher so we can play our DRM free GOG games on a libre OS.
Literally sitting with Lutris in front of me downloading a game from GOG right now. Can Heroic Games not handle it themselves like Lutris? Seems easy enough for other FOSS projects to do, I'd rather GOG continue focusing on ensuring the games run on modern hardware, and acquiring licenses to good old games, rather than now expanding the support for their already mediocre launcher.
Heroic works perfectly, in a manner identical to Lutris (from a user perspective). I tested both several years ago and have been a happy Heroic user since.
However, neither support 2 key features of GOG Galaxy:
1. cloud saves
2. achievements
These are 2 of the most significant features of competitors like Steam, IMO, so missing them for GOG on Linux is unfortunate.
The whole point of GOG is that you don't need a "client" -- it's just a store.
If you want to use something other than a standard web browser to install your games, there are plenty of options, including projects like Lutris and lgogdownloader.
I think the issue with requests to "release the client" isn't as simple as "you can use an open source alternative".
Their Galaxy backend only handles Windows and macOS builds of games. Linux builds aren't included now. There are hacks around it like using access to individual files over HTTP through zip format for Linux installers as pseudo Galaxy (lgogdownloader supports that) but it's still just a hack.
Another piece is multiplayer integration that games can ship. That depends on their support too (authentication, matching and etc).
I use lgogdownloader, but yeah they should improve their Linux support. At the very least the immediate benefit would be Galaxy protocol support for their Linux builds.
First time I heard about GOG. Is like Steam but you download the .exe installer (or wahtever format it is) from the game you purchase? Like Kazaa/Ares but paid? I love it to be honest, and I think that's how it should be, but how do creators (and GOG) fight piracy? What's preventing me from buying, getting the offline installer and then sharing it later?
If I am wrong and GOG is something completely different, then let's build something like this together! (a marketplace of offline installers!)
> What's preventing me from buying, getting the offline installer and then sharing it later?
Nothing. People already do that. GOG does not fight against this, to my knowledge they believe that people will willingly pay for good games. It worked with Witcher 3 10 years ago as an example.
Gog is great and I've been a member since probably 2010.
The one feature that would encourage me to buy more of their games is a "install into steam" script with each game. It's a massive pain in the ass making my gog games run on my steam deck.
I keep meaning to write a script to do this to ease that pain.
Have you tried using Heroic? I don't use it on the Steam Deck so maybe I'm missing something, but I use it on desktop linux all the time and it's been seamless for me.
It seems these days every video game publisher wants its own storefront and game launcher. Weird that CD PROJEKT is instead giving up a very popular one.
I wish you could always go straight to the publisher, I don't want an extra middleman in the transaction. GOG is fine because after the transaction you can download the install media and they're out of the mix, but the Steam/Epic model is terrible, it needlessly turns an open platform into a closed one.
Agreed. I know Steam has done some good things for the industry, and people love them for it, but they are also single handedly responsible for turning PC gaming from "buy and own forever" to a revocable license model. GOG is probably the last place remaining where you can actually buy games.
Awesome news really, I've bought countless games from GOG (more than Steam I think at this point) and it's a company I'll always support. Great business decision.
I am wary of the long-term prospects of GOG, but then again, I've always been wary of that since they launched - and they consistently prove me wrong.
GOG remains my first choice when I go looking for PC titles. I think it should be everyone's first choice, if I'm honest, even if Steam currently operates in a relatively consumer-friendly way. Having those offline patches and installers is a freedom you just cannot match on Steam or any other platform, and they're highly relevant to households like mine where game sharing is being cracked down upon by major publishers (looking at you, Nintendo).
I think it's good. CDPR essentially can be increasingly driven by shareholders. If they are making GOG private now, they can pursue their own vision without being pressured.
Michał Kiciński (the co-founder mentioned in the article) also funded a Vipassana retreat in Poland. You can go there to meditate for around 10–21 days, it's completely free, and people from all over the EU attend. I know because someone I know goes there regularly.
I bought a lot of stuff from GOG a long time ago, but the only thing I've use them for in the past 5 years is claiming Prime Gaming rewards on Twitch. I don't think I've even downloaded a single one of them. I'm curious if that agreement with Amazon might have hurt GOG. Did it cost them some money when people like me to claim all those games without ever converting to a paying customer?
I can't remember but there have been two games where the "it's your game, offline installer" promise was broken on Gog. Have they since come out to restate that promise?
I always felt a bit sad that before I could just KNOW that it'll work that's gog! but since that time I always have to double check and by that point why not just use steam?
Yes that was the one! They ultimately just removed the game right? I can't find it. They cannot cede an inch otherwise the game store is pointless. I'm glad it's gone.
Gwent comes to mind as an undownloadable game, which must be run from the first-party launcher, it is a free game (not counting in-game spending) which is always-online, so practically the antithesis of GOG
GOG and CD PROJEKT splitting up should ensure this is not going to happen in the future as much.
I bought from GOG once, and downloaded their launcher. Then, I started the game, played for maybe an hour, put my PC to sleep and went to bed. Then, the next next day, I resumed my PC from sleep, closed the game, and because I didn't like it, decided a few days later to request a refund.
The game had 26 hours or so logged, because Galaxy has a poor way to log hours. Apparently the interval between game start and game end is the time you played the game.
The support declined my refund request, I tried to explain that I didn't even get the achievements of after the tutorial and that I could impossibly have played that many hours because I was simply not on my PC.
The gist is: If you buy a game from GOG which you might won't like: NEVER download galaxy, only the offline installers! I didn't do that because it was too convenient to download their launcher, as the offline installer of the game I played (Baldurs Gate 3) was split into many, many files, which I would have to download one by one and install them all by hand.
Still sour to this day that I have not gotten my 50€ back. Steam never had such issues for me, and even if you can at least ask their support to escalate the ticket so someone from L2/L3 or even engineering looks at your ticket.
> Can I still download offline installers? Yes.
This is the only line I was looking for. I stopped buying on Steam sometime ago because I realized I was just renting licenses. GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually own the product. As long as offline installers remain a core tenet, I don't care who owns the company. That said, it helps that it's someone returning to their roots rather than a private equity firm looking to strip-mine the assets.
OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own.
I love GoG and I have worked closely with a lot of people there on projects they are great. This announcement seems like good news.
No one has to sell games on Steam. No one has to use a model where they "rent licenses". They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact.
There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more.
Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.
I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business.
I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now.
A few bucks cost much less to me these days than a headache with finding cracked version and installing malware on your computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers.
Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.
“Many people pirate” is a different statement than “too many people pirate games to make that a viable business”.
Piracy is much less endemic nowadays.
Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
Given how many games on Steam are sold either DRM free (you can just transfer the files over to another PC and they just work) or functionally DRM free (Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, so one step removed from DRM free), this doesn't really scan. Other than games with Denuvo and multiplayer games, DRM is a non-issue for actual pirates.
It seems a lot more likely to me that the people in charge will have a fit at the idea of releasing the games DRM free, but don't actually care to know anything about the details. So long as the DRM checkbox is ticked, and they don't know about the fact that Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, everybody mostly gets what they want.
Also, many such games are on gog DRM free, and certainly pirates don't care where they get their games.
Yes they do. When I used to pirate a lot of games because I was broke I was gleefully happy to see a GOG release.
The scene exists for a reason, it is a very trust based ecosystem.
Yeah I usually trust anything a girl who is particularly fit repacks
People only pirate games because the publishers make it too painful to play games legally. I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. This pattern has been shown time and time again. When people pirate, it's usually due to a problem with the experience. People pay for convenience.
Now a days a lot of people are pirating games because the quality of games has gone down the drain. Publishers are releasing unfinished games and pricing them at record high. Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.
I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.
For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters.
For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).
For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.
> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).
“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.
And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.
> I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money
Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.
The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from third world countries that pirate for financial reasons just would not buy those games regardless. I'm unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to any meaningful degree.
When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.
No, paying nothing is very compelling for a lot of consumers, you can see this in many other areas of content as well.
Research from the University of Amsterdam’s IViR “Global Online Piracy Study” (survey of nearly 35,000 respondents across 13 countries) found that for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally, and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non‑pirating legal users.
Fun fact, this study was financed by YouTube to create a legal shield.
In 2017/2018, they were in the position where MPAA and RIAA were saying: "Piracy costs us billions; Google must pay" + they had European Parliament on their ass.
Google financed that 'independent' study to support the view "Piracy is not harmful and encourages legal spend".
So the credibility of "independent" studies, is something to consider very carefully.
My real world observations agree with the direction of the study, so I don’t entirely dismiss it as fake based on its funding source.
I am cautious about the conclusion, though. It seems clear there is a spectrum from “unscrupulously pirate everything” to “consume legitimately after pirated discovery”, and quantification is necessary.
Before it was really expensive and difficult to get access to movies or music. Then came Netflix or Spotify. So money is the primary discriminator now, not access. And users without money would not bring revenue anyway
No they don't. I am tired of this feel good nonsense. I pirated games because it was free and I did not want to pay $60.
Just make your games a donation model if you really believe this. Or lets put up a version of Steam where all the games are free cracked copies of the game and see how it affects sales.
People pay precisely because they dont want to deal with the hassle pf pirating
I can pirate games easily, but I buy them on Steam because it's more convenient. If it's too expensive for me, I just never play it (or wait for a deal). I can't be bothered dealing with the installers and the potential viruses and the hassle.
I’m fabulously wealthy and still mostly pirate things just because I can’t be bothered dealing with online credit card payments.
Half the time I try to sign up for any of these services I get blocked for fraud because I’m in one country, my billing address in another and my bank in a third. Oh, and when something does work, it only works for a while until they lock the whole account with a bunch of paid content on it.
>because it's more convenient
Yes, now imagine if we just removed the barrier to piracy completely. An easy to use client just like Steam, except all the games are free cracked copies.
There is no way thats not going to drop sales.
thieves lie to protect their self-image. i pirated because free games let me spend my money on stuff i couldn't steal like food at the mall.
i don't pirate anymore because i have a job now.
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
This is what we've been told since time eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.
people are commenting in this HN thread like piracy hasn't been thought about, deeply, by many thousands of people for ages in the games industry. i could link to numerous people writing very wise things about it - the CEO of a certain competitor to GOG and Steam comes to mind, he basically wrote the Luther thesis on games piracy - but then i'd be downvoted.
> They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
Depends on the game and DRM. Nowadays I buy all of my games (a little bit safer than running who knows what on my PC), but when I didn't have a job or money I used to pirate a lot - most DRM protected games would eventually be cracked and made available regardless. If an uncrackable DRM was in place, I wouldn't buy the game - I just wouldn't play it. Depending on the mindset, the same logic applies to someone with money, they might never be a customer regardless of whether it can or cannot be pirated, especially for games that never go on big discounts and sales. I say that as someone who by now owns about ~1000 games in total legally (though mostly smaller indie titles acquired over a lot of years and sales).
The good online stores at least make the act of purchasing and installing games equally if not more convenient than pirating them - something all of those streaming companies that crank up their subscription prices and want to introduce ads would also do well to remember. I like Steam the best because it's a convenient experience, the Workshop mod support is nice, as well as Proton on Linux and even being able to run some games on my Mac, just download and run. I think the last games I pirated were to check if they'd run well on my VR headset, because I didn't want to spend a few hours tweaking graphics settings and messing around just to be denied a refund - in the end they didn't run well, so I didn't play or buy them, oh well.
Also, despite me somewhat doubting the efficacy of DRM (maybe it's good to have around the release time to motivate legit sales, but it's not like it's gonna solve piracy), it better at least be implemented well - otherwise you either get performance issues, or crap that also happens with gaming on Linux with anti-cheat, where you cannot even give the companies money because they can't be bothered to support your platform. Even worse when games depend on a server component for something that you don't actually need for playing the game on your own, fuck that. It's like the big corpos sometimes add Denuvo to their games and then are surprised why people are review bombing them.
How is GOG a viable business if everything gets pirated?
This is a really old question and a really old solution.
It turns out that piracy is actually a service problem. Services like Steam and GOG provide a decent enough service that piracy becomes less common.
Steam uses outsized market power to take an enormous %30 cut so it also does major damage to the games industry.
Valve and Steam dont force DRM on anyone either. Downloader client is ofc DRM in itself, but a lot of games run just fine without Steamworks.
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.
Piracy is widespread, that's undeniable. The question that industry groups and lawmakers love to avoid or lie about however is how much of that piracy represents lost sales, and how much represents people in the third world finding a way to participate with all of the people who can afford it. I pirated a lot as a kid because I had no money, there were no lost sales there. As an adult I don't pirate at all, because I have money, because it's inconvenient now compared to legitimate access.
So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Steam is a good option (I personally love it), and frankly if the worst happens and the games I pay for go away on Steam... there are options. Once I pay for something I no longer feel any guilt about seeking a backup for example, and neither should you, even if the industry groups count that as a full-sale price theft.
>GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually own the product.
How do we re-sell our GOG games to someone else?
If I own it I should be able to sell it again, right? Like I used to sell old console game disks after I was done with them.
Just give them the files and pinky promise to delete them yourself?
Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership Of corse, practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers, so its much better to use GoG if you care about this.
The reason they also do this is because of copyright, the license allows games to forbid you from redistribution more copies
If Im wrong about this please let me know, I read some articles claiming this is the case but I am not sure if they truly were correct.
>practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers
Well it makes it hard or impossible to sell your copy of the game to someone else after you are done with it like we used to be able to do with console game discs and cartridges?
Seems like a pretty big and practical difference to me.
You can also buy boxed things and have the problem. For example FL Studio, you buy the boxed edition 300 USD, and all you get is a serial number. Once it's linked to an account, it's over (and it's actually the only way).
If legislators want to do something good, they could force platforms to allow transfer of games between accounts.
Doesn't this fly in the face of Vernor vs Autodesk and other lwgal precedent? Not that they can't change this, but legislators have a vested interest in protecting software rights
Yes but if you set up a website to do this they could sue, which I think is reasonable as many if not most people would be happy to both sell and keep a copy
I also refuse to install their shop, Web powered "native" apps only the unavoidable ones.
I think the only value it adds is cloud saves. The UI is otherwise the worst way to explore your library or the store, crawls to death performance-wise and isn't even a good UX in principle.
For example, if you're on page X of a search, click on a game, and go back, guess where that takes you? Yup, page 0 baby, going to have to click next X times again (there is also only previous and next; you can't fast-jump.) There are many more examples like that, I have filed survey responses several times on issues like this.
The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup. Currently that relationship flows in the other direction, which I always found odd: Lutris integrates GOG (and Steam) games in its UI.
> The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup.
Heroic Launcher can download the game files for you and any dependencies, including Wine/Proton/etc. You basically install the launcher (can be available from your distro's repository), use your GOG login in the app and it shows your library. Then click install and it'll download the files locally and after that you play the game. The experience is more or less the same like in Steam, at least as far as downloading and playing games is concerned.
I normally download the offline installers and use them with UMU Launcher (which is Proton without Steam, mainly meant to be used as a backend for projects like Lutris, Heroic, etc but you can use it directly from the command-line) but i just tried Heroic Launcher and all i had to do was run it, enter my GOG login and after it downloaded my library info, i was able to download and play a game the same way as in Steam.
I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add here TBH.
> I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add here TBH.
Two major things:
* Backend Galaxy support for Linux builds
* Multiplayer, achievements, cloud saves, etc. i.e. proper integration with optional GOG services for Linux versions.
I have it easier having Windows as main OS.
From the FAQ:
> Is GOG financially unstable? No. GOG is stable and has had a really encouraging year. In fact, we’ve seen more enthusiasm from gamers towards our mission than ever before.
I'm really happy to hear this, as I always feared their hard stance on no-DRM would scare off publishers and developers, but seems that fear might have been overstated. This year I personally also started buying more games on GOG than Steam, even when they were available on Stream. Prior to 2025 I almost exclusively used Steam unless it wasn't available there, but now GOG is #1 :)
Glad it's moving in even better directions, thank you Team GOG!
I had the opposite takeaway.
Companies with strong financial performance don't tend to use words like "encouraging". That is the language you get from companies that are in trouble and hoping for recovery.
Talking about people's enthusiasm for their mission is just straight up dodging the question itself.
If I read their income statement from Q3 correctly it is comparatively not doing great.
01.01.2025 to 30.09.2025 net profit 910 thousand PLN I think.
01.01.2024 to 30.09.2024 net profit 32 thousand PLN.
With "from 1 January to 30 September 2025: 4.2365 PLN/EUR and from 1 January to 30 September 2024:4.3022 PLN/EUR."
It is not that much. So splitting it off probably make sense for the CD Projekt.
I'm not sure I understand your figures. What is "32 thousand PLN", surely their entire annual profit for all of 2024 was not literally 32K PLN (approx. 9K USD)? Is this measured in millions? And whatever they're measured in, surely 32K to 910K in the span of a year is considered excellent progress?
No it was actually just circa 9 thousand Euros from GOG.COM. And it seems there was period of having potential loss of million PLN as well in Q3 of 2024 I think. So it looks quite variable based on which products release.
See: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2025/11/c...
Starting from page 28.
Maybe they are just heavily reinvesting?
I think reality is that being game retailer is harsh market if you are anyone else but Valve with Steam. Selling copies redeemed on Steam is workable, but seeing that pretty much all big publishers are back on Steam should tell a lot of state of the market. And GOG has bigger mind share than actual market share.
https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/result-center/q3-2025... [has a bunch of files at the bottom too, for more data]
> Consolidated net earnings during the reporting period stood at 193 million PLN – 2.5 times more than during the corresponding period of the previous year, which results in a net profitability of 55%.
Maybe I don't understand "profits above all" sufficiently well as some of my peers, but that seems Good Enough to me.
Overall CD Projekt is doing well, but cut associated to GOG.COM is paltry as shown above.
No company with an ounce of brain and a good accountant reports profit in eastern Europe :)
This goes for publicly traded companies much more than privately owned ones.
GOG is now becoming private like Valve rather than publicly traded.
I guess I trust them that if they would be in trouble, they'd say so, not say "GOG is stable". But I've been wrong before, could be in this situation too, I guess I'm more hoping that they wouldn't lie to their users in their face like that.
I had the same takeaway -- in fact, I think it's CD Projekt who hopes to distance themselves from GOG.
I always search GOG before Steam. It’s slightly less user friendly in the most minor ways and sometimes a bit more expensive. But getting DRM free games is worth every penny and extra few moments. Steam is really great for what it is but you’re not buying games you’re leasing them. Excited to hear GOG might get more focus and investment.
> you’re not buying games you’re leasing them
Counterpoint, the cost of "owning" offline games is not zero and their lifetime is not infinite.
I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting them to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck. (In fact, for nearly all that I care about I also have bought a Steam license in addition).
Ultimately, everything comes down to user experience. We can pat ourselves on the back for buying something forever, but experiences and the media they are stored on are both transitory.
> you’re leasing them
For the duration of your life, to be fair.
No, for the duration of whenever Steam decides to say "fuck you".
Which is basically never. They have no incentive to do that except for extreme circumstances, and they have all the leverage in the world over game publishers.
Delisted games tend to stay in your library for redownload.
I never understood the cynicism for digital media, it’s been multiple decades now and the model clearly works.
Obviously I prefer zero DRM but it’s also not a hard line requirement for me personally.
All of this is based on the assumption that the way it was done is the way it will be done.
Who will own and run Steam 30 years from now? Gabe Newell will be long-gone, his nepobaby next-CEO will be closing in on retirement if they don't check-out early to enjoy their vast wealth like Gabe has done.
What does Steam look like 60 years from now? Adults using it today are mostly dead and all of their licenses revoked forever, the games removed from circulation gone forever because nobody can ever have a license to use them again. They might be onto their 4th, 5th or 6th CEO by then, half a century removed from Gabe and any expectations we have around the ways he did things.
There's a lot of room for improvement securing some sort of legacy for Steam.
I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20 or whatever OS will be the dominant for PC in 30 or 60 years time.
Most C64, MSX, Apple,Amiga, Atari ST and Dos games can still be played on all majors operating systems.
In fact I used "most" but I can't name one that couldn't be played.
> I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20
Given the lengths the Windows development team has gone to, to preserve backward compatibility, to the point that there was individual-game-specific workarounds codified in Windows, makes this claim the same as the GP’s, that Steam will change 30-60 years from now.
The cynic in me thinks you’re both right, mind.
If it works on WINE today, I would expect it to work on WINE tomorrow. Worst case, you can probably just install an older WINE on a newer OS to ensure it.
It would presumably work in a virtualized environment.
Are you willing to put monies on that?
I mean I don't really give a shit. Im buying a game to play it now, maybe next year.
Besides you only need Steam if the publisher chooses to use Steam DRM. There's clearly an incentive for it, don't think its purely Steam's fault.
If that's the model the publisher offers, that's the model you have. Its your choice to participate in it or not.
They can't control the licenses rights for some assets like music that can expire and become undistributable. You may not know it until you install them on a new computer n years from now.
You never know, Gaben is getting older. Who knows what the next CEO of Valve will do?
At least with Valve we can hope its gonna be okay for 4 reasons:
1. Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more time on his other projects.
2. Flat structure and and a small team. I know few people who has worked at Valve and while there are some downsides company of ~400 employees with a lot of internal power play is just more resilient than normal corporation. Many of people on the team are just rich enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.
3. From what is publicly known Valve is family owned basically since Gabe own major part of company. And while a lot of people would hate example of e.g Ubisoft its good example how family controlled business often sink before selling out.
4. It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control from the team without destroying both company and gaming community goodwill.
Yet I fully agree that Valve just like other company can be sold off just for userbase and run to the ground.
Valve just have better chance to stay customer friendly than your overall VC/PE/BlackRock owned corporation with 10,000 employees and 50 for-hire top managers / board directors.
Physical media rots too. I don't watch my DVD collection anymore because I don't have access to a working DVD player, but I've read that a lot of those discs don't play anymore because the publishers cheaped out on materials when they minted the discs.
Ever bought anything from MSN Music? Yahoo Music? Desura? Microsoft eBook Store? Walmart MP3s? Anything using Adobe Content Server? MusicNet? CinemaNow? UltraViolet?
It is laughable to think that digital media "clearly works". Companies shut down and stores shutter all the time. In most cases there is no recourse for customers, because – surprise – you didn't actually own the rights to what you bought, just a revocable license. You have to be pretty young and/or naive to think that this can't eventually happen to Steam as well.
And even if you fully trust Steam to stick around and keep its word, digital licensing means you can still get screwed. For example - if the publisher's license to in-game music expires, the game will automatically be updated to remove all the tracks (e.g. GTA Vice City and San Andreas). For larger issues and conflicts the game might be removed entirely (e.g. Spec Ops: The Line). Or the publisher might decide to just switch off the DRM servers, even for single player games (e.g. The Crew). Outside of gaming there are countless examples of publishers "upgrading" music tracks you own to different versions or censoring/altering content of books you own.
The only recourse to all this is to buy and store DRM-free versions of your media.
> "buy" Hozier's album
> change countries
> oh, you own this album for Bulgaria, but not for the US, so you can no longer play it
Region-locked physical media (and before explicit region locking, PAL vs NTSC vs SECAM vs variants like PAL-M) also have this problem to some extent.
Yes and no. I took my physical media with me along with my player, and all was fine.
I took my digital media with me along with my computer, and all was not fine.
Which is the same as what can happen to GOG if you don't have the files backed up. And if you do happen to have them backed up, is there such a large difference between having the installer vs the full game installation stored?
Yes there is a difference. Steam sells you a license that can be revoked at any time. The games have DRM, and rely on cloud servers to authenticate you. If you turn your internet off they will all stop working after a certain period, even if fully downloaded. And if Steam or the DRM owner goes out of business you will end up with nothing.
If you buy and download something from GOG, it is yours. You can still play it in the next millenium as long as you have suitable hardware or an emulator.
> The games have DRM, and rely on cloud servers to authenticate you.
That is not true as a global rule. Game developers can release fully independent versions of their games even on steam.
They can. Do they? Statistically?
Not all steam games have DRM
This is true but you don't know ahead of time before you buy a game, you have to gamble on it being the case or not (i've found that while some lists exist in places like pcgamingwiki, they tend to be both very incomplete and often wrong).
Usually indie games tend to be DRM-free though, so if an indie game isn't available on GOG or Zoom Platform (another DRM-free store), i end up buying on Steam.
For the duration of gaben’s life, to be fair. Beyond that there be dragons.
For the duration of the businesses’ life.
Same but I strangely miss the social aspect of achievements on Steam. I prefer GOG but wish the achievements synced.
You are the first person I hear that seems to care about that.
How is GOG functionally different from Steam? They're still just a middle man. For actual DRM-free software, both GOG and Steam are nothing more than a convenience layer. If they're anything more than that, the software simply isn't DRM-free.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. The distinction is pretty clear: GOG distributes standalone installers without any DRM, and Steam does not.
Compared to Steam directly, yeah, sometimes a bit more expensive. But as soon as you go to sites selling steam keys (proper ones, not resellers), it's "almost always, a lot", as steam itself rarely has good prices. Now that might still be worth it, but it's relevant
> But as soon as you go to sites selling steam keys (proper ones, not resellers),
What is a company/individual if not a reseller if they're selling Steam keys? You cannot sell Steam keys without being Steam or the developer itself, and not be called a "reseller". Or what sites are you referring to here, stuff like Humble Bundle where you get Steam keys with the bundles?
Resellers sell something they bought. Or that's the idea. The sites are marketplaces, sometimes having people sell keys from different countries, sometimes stolen credit card keys. There are several game devs saying they'd prefer people pirating over using those sites.
Real stores sell steam keys because they are selling directly from the developers. Steam is actually nice (or preempting monopoly talk, depending on your view) in that it allows that (I think there are limits, but IIRC rather generous)
> Real stores sell steam keys because they are selling directly from the developers
And how did these "real stores" get those Steam keys unless they bought them, maybe even directly from the developers? Or are you saying game developers hand out these keys for free to the store, then the store sends the developer money for each key they sell? I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense.
What is an example of one such site selling Steam keys who you wouldn't consider a reseller?
Normal store: fanatical.com
Key reseller: https://www.loaded.com
You really don't need to be so combatative.
I cannot see a difference, what is the difference between a "normal store" and a "key reseller"?
Google it. As friendly as you are, I have no interest it helping you. Not even to explain myself.
Humble Bundle usually gives you Steam keys
Apart from times when they have run out and continue to sell...
I’m just going to go ahead and plug is there any deal dot com.
You can sync up your Steam wishlist (it’s a little weird to setup but once you figured it out it works).
I almost never buy games directly from steam anymore, there’s almost always someone else with a discount on steam keys.
And sometimes GOG has the best deal!
I love ITAD! If you use a search engine like kagi or duck duck go supporting bangs, you can use !itad to search there.
In case I'm not the only one who didn't know what GOG stood for:
But actually, it stands (stood?) for Good Old Games. :)It was "good old games", then they announced that good old games was going away and after everyone panic-downloaded their whole collection they announced that they weren't going anywhere but they were just going to be GOG without it standing for anything.
That was after they had new releases for a while.
I stand agog as I breathlessly await the next exciting element of this discussion.
I'm waiting for MAGOG so the Biblical End Times can begin.
Denoting a translation is not the only thing that "stands for" stands for.
No, it literally doesn't stand for good old games. Not for a very long time.
I used to love gog. I purchased a bunch of stuff back when they were talking a big game around supporting Linux with their Galaxy client.
But while gog was talking, Valve was actually doing. Building an actual Linux client. Making multiplayer actually work. Not to mention all the work they've done with Proton and upstreamimg graphics drivers.
I hope gog succeeds. I just value Linux gaming support over not having DRM. It's kinda a idealist vs realist stance for me.
There are tons of Linux games distributed on GOG, and not having to use a proprietary client is one of its great advantages. Not to downplay Valve's contributions (and I may well get a Steam Frame when they come out), but they mostly amount to porting their mandatory DRM-laden client to Linux, and maintaining a fork of Wine that integrates with that client.
Ownership, control, and privacy are among the main reasons I use Linux, and are likewise huge advantages that GOG has over Steam.
Official Linux releases are almost never maintained. I have the same game on Steam and GOG, but the GOG version no longer works. Neither does the Steam version, except if I switch to the Windows version with Proton. Then it works flawlessly (usually faster and better than the Linux version ever did.)
There is only 1 Steam client for Linux, and there will only ever be one client, and that client has had basic issues (context menus being a completely new window that steals focus, comes to mind instantly) that have been unresolved year after year.
For GOG, there are plenty of clients for Linux [1][2][3][4], And they are open source, I can go and talk to the people making these clients directly, I can give feedback, I can make changes to make these clients better (and to a small degree, I already have).
[1]: https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/
[2]: https://sites.google.com/site/gogdownloader/
[3]: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
[4]: https://www.hyperplay.xyz/
This is true, but there are pros and cons.
Pro 1: reduced lockin
Pro 2: open source options
Con 1: not all options are all that easy to use or feature complete, making the "choice" a mandatory QA/research task, rather than a way to exercise personal taste/freedom
Con 2: no galaxy-only features like achievements and save file cloud sync
(My personal testing led to choosing Heroic)
The unfortunate or fortunate reality of network effects also means Steam is usually best suited to preserve content that might otherwise be lost. Both in terms of literally holding the data for longer than the general public (including workshop files), but also by keeping communities active and alive.
I think it's perfectly realistic to think there is a substantial risk of losing library content you've bought on Valve in the next 20 years. Don't know what the odds are, but they're greater than zero.
It doesn’t look like GOG can afford to pay for that work. I think we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able to invest in Linux.
Valve started to invest in Linux and open source 10 years before releasing Steam Deck. They started hiring OSS developers back in 2012 and Deck released in 2022:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/valve_linux_dampfnudeln
It's so nice to have these little oases of ethical businesses in tech. A shame that it feels like the desert is only growing exponentially.
It is great because game preservation isn't what game industry shareholders usually interested.
CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.
I don't think it's fair to call Cyberpunk 2077 a colossal flop. It had an awful release, but the company stood behind it and fixed everything that needed fixing. Five years later it is now an acclaimed game that sold 35 million copies.
Yup, Cyberpunk 2077 has sold more copies in the same time frame than Witcher 3, which is routinely highlighted as one of the best and most successful games of all time.
You have to give kudos to CD PROJEKT for not just abandoning the game after a bad launch (which is what every other major studio would have done in its place) but patiently fixing problems and constantly adding content over 5 years to get to the state it is in today. And the game has no online requirement, no multiplayer, no microtransactions. Just one paid expansion which added a ton of new content. Rare to see this behavior in the industry today.
Studious dont abandon failed releases because they are evil. Its just releases fail because they run out of money so there just nothing to burn to save them.
CDPR just was lucky enough to make enough money of failed release to fix it. Most companies get no chance to do it.
EA is notorious for throwing games out there and abandoning them as soon as they don't turn out to be massive hits. That is a company that has plenty of resources to support the games and fix the bugs.
Not gonna protect EA the company here, but lots and lots of other games also flop on release because money.
> which is what every other major studio would have done in its place
Afaik CDPR doesn't make many games. If one flops, that might be the end of them. I don't see abandoning a game as a valid option for them from a financial perspective. Makes much more sense to fix the issues and sell more.
I think it’s more related to their reputation? People will buy the next one if they trust CDPR will fix anything wrong with it even if it flops.
Kinda how you trust paradox strategy titles to get several years of updates and expansions.
Definite kudos to them for that, though notably it's down to 65% off now, so presumably many of those copies were for not-full-retail price.
And the Switch 2 port likely cost considerable engineering effort and underperformed as well.
What game was a colossal flop? Cyberpunk was released too early but they kept on delivering patches and then the players game. It's their highest earning title.
IIRC they fixed various bugs but they didn't fix the broken promises. The biggest problems with Cyberpunk were architectural, things that would basically require redesigning the game to match what was promised.
Online sentiment has drastically changed about how bad those broken promises were - a near-complete turnaround, similar to what happened with No Man's Sky. Basically from when the DLC was released, most people started feeling that they fulfilled the essence of everything that was promised.
IMO Cyberpunk is fundamentally not the game their marketing promissed. They marketed it as actually non-linear RPG and beyond very beginning of the game they just could't deliver on it.
After tons of patches and DLCs its just became a very very good game. Just not what was promissed.
I also started playing it this year and the experience at least now has been fantastic
> he believes GOG’s approach is more relevant than ever: no lock-in, no forced platforms, sense of ownership
I really hope that we'll be freed from the forced Windows platform. Sure, you can download and install GOG games today using a third-party client, but it'll never be as good as official support. There's also the issue of syncing saved games and achievements, not to mention the additional friction for less tech-savvy users.
TBH Heroic Launcher isn't particularly hard to get. Just download and run the AppImage file from their site, login to your GOG account and it'll download any dependencies automatically.
It isn't any harder to use Heroic Launcher than it is to use Steam and some distros have both in their repositories.
https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/regulatory-announceme...
>Pursuant to the Purchase Agreement, on 31 December 2025 Michał Kiciński will acquire from the Company 2715 shares in GOG, i.e. 100% of the shares in GOG representing 100% of the votes at the shareholders’ meeting of GOG, for a price of PLN 90,695,440.00
>In accordance with the arrangements of the parties to the Transaction, prior to the execution of the Purchase Agreement, an amount of PLN 44,200,000.00 (forty-four million two hundred thousand zlotys 00/100) was paid out to the Company as distribution of due – as the Company was thus the sole shareholder of GOG – profits of GOG from previous years.
90 million PLN being ~21,5 million euros. Seems like some money was also held there.
Does anyone know the backstory here? Is CDprojekt not the right owner anymore? I am clearly not following the ownership closely here ( but maybe I should have ).
It's part of the FAQ at the bottom:
> Why is CD PROJECT doing this?
> Selling GOG fits CD PROJEKT’s long-term strategy. CD PROJEKT wants to focus its full attention on creating top-quality RPGs and providing our fans with other forms of entertainment based on our brands. This deal lets CD PROJEKT keep that focus, while GOG gets stronger backing to pursue its own mission.
> What is GOG's position in this?
> To us at GOG, this feels like the best way to accelerate what is unique about GOG. Michał Kiciński is one of the people who created GOG around a simple idea: bring classic games back, and make sure that once you purchase a game, you have control over it forever. With him acquiring GOG, we keep long-term backing that is aligned with our values: freedom, independence, control, and making games stay playable over time.
Apologies, I accept FAQ exists, but I am simply asking if there is more to the story than corporate release.
GOG isn’t as good of a business as CDPR’s development studios so it is getting spun off.
I've spent hundreds of hours on the GOG version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Every community recommends the GOG version over the Steam HD one. I didn't think how important GOG was to me, but now I'm going to find that patron program they're talking about. It would be great if in 30 years I can still play Master of Magic and that won't happen by itself.
You might be interested in VCMI, which is an open source engine for HoMM3.
https://vcmi.eu/
> Master of Magic
I picked up a bargain bin CD ROM of this game in 1996 and it works under dosbox as well as it ever did. Which is to say mostly ok but sometimes hilariously crashy. I think what needs to happen for us to spend another 30 years crafting overpowered plate mail is for there to continue being good emulators for the mid 90s DOS environment.
Do you ever play online multiplayer HOMM3? Is it a thing nowadays?
I suspect this has been in a vague planning stage for the last few years, as various integrations between GOG and CD PROJEKT RED were slowly dismantled over that time (I particularly recall a GWENT account migration away from GOG).
Also, I guess this is as good a place as any to plug my GOG game discovery service and price tracker: https://gamesieve.com/ - basically a more full-featured way to explore GOG's catalog.
For self-hosting nerds, I can recommend looking at Gamevault (https://gamevau.lt)
Passionate people working on creating a self-hosted game library. They deserve attention and support!
Please release a Linux client or, even better, officially support and invest in developing Heroic Games Launcher so we can play our DRM free GOG games on a libre OS.
Literally sitting with Lutris in front of me downloading a game from GOG right now. Can Heroic Games not handle it themselves like Lutris? Seems easy enough for other FOSS projects to do, I'd rather GOG continue focusing on ensuring the games run on modern hardware, and acquiring licenses to good old games, rather than now expanding the support for their already mediocre launcher.
Heroic works perfectly, in a manner identical to Lutris (from a user perspective). I tested both several years ago and have been a happy Heroic user since.
However, neither support 2 key features of GOG Galaxy:
1. cloud saves
2. achievements
These are 2 of the most significant features of competitors like Steam, IMO, so missing them for GOG on Linux is unfortunate.
Exactly, or open the protocol and let the community write it.
Third option is to ensure the downloader runs under proton, which I think it does but haven’t tried.
Protocol is well documented already, GOG aren't really blocking community clients:
https://gogapidocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
The problem is mostly that their backend isn't wired for Linux builds so you can't use the APIs for native Linux versions.
> Please release a Linux client
The whole point of GOG is that you don't need a "client" -- it's just a store.
If you want to use something other than a standard web browser to install your games, there are plenty of options, including projects like Lutris and lgogdownloader.
I think the issue with requests to "release the client" isn't as simple as "you can use an open source alternative".
Their Galaxy backend only handles Windows and macOS builds of games. Linux builds aren't included now. There are hacks around it like using access to individual files over HTTP through zip format for Linux installers as pseudo Galaxy (lgogdownloader supports that) but it's still just a hack.
Another piece is multiplayer integration that games can ship. That depends on their support too (authentication, matching and etc).
That and/or proper remote desktop implementation.
I use lgogdownloader, but yeah they should improve their Linux support. At the very least the immediate benefit would be Galaxy protocol support for their Linux builds.
First time I heard about GOG. Is like Steam but you download the .exe installer (or wahtever format it is) from the game you purchase? Like Kazaa/Ares but paid? I love it to be honest, and I think that's how it should be, but how do creators (and GOG) fight piracy? What's preventing me from buying, getting the offline installer and then sharing it later?
If I am wrong and GOG is something completely different, then let's build something like this together! (a marketplace of offline installers!)
> What's preventing me from buying, getting the offline installer and then sharing it later?
Nothing. People already do that. GOG does not fight against this, to my knowledge they believe that people will willingly pay for good games. It worked with Witcher 3 10 years ago as an example.
I love this, to be honest. Glad to learn that this is how the operate!
Gog is great and I've been a member since probably 2010.
The one feature that would encourage me to buy more of their games is a "install into steam" script with each game. It's a massive pain in the ass making my gog games run on my steam deck.
I keep meaning to write a script to do this to ease that pain.
Have you tried using Heroic? I don't use it on the Steam Deck so maybe I'm missing something, but I use it on desktop linux all the time and it's been seamless for me.
It seems these days every video game publisher wants its own storefront and game launcher. Weird that CD PROJEKT is instead giving up a very popular one.
I wish you could always go straight to the publisher, I don't want an extra middleman in the transaction. GOG is fine because after the transaction you can download the install media and they're out of the mix, but the Steam/Epic model is terrible, it needlessly turns an open platform into a closed one.
Agreed. I know Steam has done some good things for the industry, and people love them for it, but they are also single handedly responsible for turning PC gaming from "buy and own forever" to a revocable license model. GOG is probably the last place remaining where you can actually buy games.
The more things change, the more they stay the same?
I rarely use GOG, but they're doing good work, so it's nice to know they'll be sticking around. I wouldn't have it any other way.
I wish there was a general software equivalent of GOG that provided much older software with removed DRM.
What old software are you thinking about?
This a hundred time
For anyone else wondering what GOG is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
Awesome news really, I've bought countless games from GOG (more than Steam I think at this point) and it's a company I'll always support. Great business decision.
I am wary of the long-term prospects of GOG, but then again, I've always been wary of that since they launched - and they consistently prove me wrong.
GOG remains my first choice when I go looking for PC titles. I think it should be everyone's first choice, if I'm honest, even if Steam currently operates in a relatively consumer-friendly way. Having those offline patches and installers is a freedom you just cannot match on Steam or any other platform, and they're highly relevant to households like mine where game sharing is being cracked down upon by major publishers (looking at you, Nintendo).
Keep on keepin' on, GOG. I'm rootin' for ya.
I think it's good. CDPR essentially can be increasingly driven by shareholders. If they are making GOG private now, they can pursue their own vision without being pressured.
At least it’s not another Chinese firm
Michał Kiciński (the co-founder mentioned in the article) also funded a Vipassana retreat in Poland. You can go there to meditate for around 10–21 days, it's completely free, and people from all over the EU attend. I know because someone I know goes there regularly.
I bought a lot of stuff from GOG a long time ago, but the only thing I've use them for in the past 5 years is claiming Prime Gaming rewards on Twitch. I don't think I've even downloaded a single one of them. I'm curious if that agreement with Amazon might have hurt GOG. Did it cost them some money when people like me to claim all those games without ever converting to a paying customer?
I can't remember but there have been two games where the "it's your game, offline installer" promise was broken on Gog. Have they since come out to restate that promise?
I always felt a bit sad that before I could just KNOW that it'll work that's gog! but since that time I always have to double check and by that point why not just use steam?
Can't find anything about those broken promises at a glance
It was HITMAN released on GOG with always online DRM and removed after backlash. They obviously refunded to everyone.
https://www.gog.com/en/news/release_hitman_game_of_the_year_...
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_hitman_game_of_the...
Yes that was the one! They ultimately just removed the game right? I can't find it. They cannot cede an inch otherwise the game store is pointless. I'm glad it's gone.
Gwent comes to mind as an undownloadable game, which must be run from the first-party launcher, it is a free game (not counting in-game spending) which is always-online, so practically the antithesis of GOG
GOG and CD PROJEKT splitting up should ensure this is not going to happen in the future as much.
It's nice that it should be a non-event for users.
I bought from GOG once, and downloaded their launcher. Then, I started the game, played for maybe an hour, put my PC to sleep and went to bed. Then, the next next day, I resumed my PC from sleep, closed the game, and because I didn't like it, decided a few days later to request a refund.
The game had 26 hours or so logged, because Galaxy has a poor way to log hours. Apparently the interval between game start and game end is the time you played the game.
The support declined my refund request, I tried to explain that I didn't even get the achievements of after the tutorial and that I could impossibly have played that many hours because I was simply not on my PC.
The gist is: If you buy a game from GOG which you might won't like: NEVER download galaxy, only the offline installers! I didn't do that because it was too convenient to download their launcher, as the offline installer of the game I played (Baldurs Gate 3) was split into many, many files, which I would have to download one by one and install them all by hand.
Still sour to this day that I have not gotten my 50€ back. Steam never had such issues for me, and even if you can at least ask their support to escalate the ticket so someone from L2/L3 or even engineering looks at your ticket.