> 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.
Third option is to ensure the downloader runs under proton, which I think it does but haven’t tried.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
See: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2025/11/c...
Starting from page 28.
> 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.
For the duration of your life, to be fair.
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.
That is not true as a global rule. Game developers can release fully independent versions of their games even on steam.
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.
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.
> change countries
> oh, you own this album for Bulgaria, but not for the US, so you can no longer play it
Who will own and run Steam 30 years from now? Gabe Newell will be long-gone, his nebobaby 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.
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!
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?
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)
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?
Key reseller: https://www.loaded.com
You really don't need to be so combatative.
“GOG stands for freedom, independence, and genuine control.”
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Ownership, control, and privacy are among the main reasons I use Linux, and are likewise huge advantages that GOG has over Steam.
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/
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.
If I am wrong and GOG is something completely different, then let's build something like this together! (a marketplace of offline installers!)
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.
Passionate people working on creating a self-hosted game library. They deserve attention and support!
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
>n 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.
bogzz•1h ago