X is the number of games sold on GOG that are from CDProjek.

Y is the number of games sold on GOG that are from other sources.

X ~ 5
Y ~ 10000 (including at least few hundreds that are major titles)

If X(sales) > Y,(sales) then each CDProjek game sell at least as much as 2000 games (Y/X) from other sources (including a lot of pretty successful ones). Let's keep it real, no...

GOG mostly breaks even (sometimes a bit in the red, but not by much). It follows that most of its operations are funded by the sale of games not from CDProjek.

Let's talk about six Googy, let's talk about you and me,
Let's talk about all the figures in this event, sweet baby,
Let's talk about six, let's talk about ten.

£€¥$¢10 a month? Optional figures?

Take into account that i would not buy Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk on Steam, so if CDPR is not offering it on GOG they will have a total loss on customers such as me. Good maths would be way more complicated as there are so many factors playing a role. No matter what, GOG simply need to generate more revenue in some way. So far it is not in a critical spot but as well with close to no profits... so the shareholders are not feeling the "Nvidia-drive"... yet they are not becoming bankrupt any time soon.

In fact, only about every 5. game i would buy if NOT on GOG... and those games i already got on PS5 and a bunch of them on Steam/EGS (~100 non GOG games vs. ~500 GOG games). The other 80% would be a total loss without GOG but many publishers would rather pass on customers such as me instead of "only" getting a pretty marginal percentage out of the sales, as customers such as me are still not common and in many cases they think "It is not worth it". So, the key is simply to get more customers, but how it is done is the big "final question".

The 6% net profit margin is what's left after GOG's expenses after both CDPR and 3rd party devpub games are sold on GOG.

GOG only breaks even by forex on their non-PLN currencies at highs and cutting costs by laying off staff. That's why they have a 30% turnover rate every year because their workers get let go or quit quickly.

This is not a sustainable business model. I cannot emphasize enough to you guys not reading the reports how bad this is.

Okay, and what now? Should we all run away in fear and start to pray 3 times daily?

Alternatively you could go to Steam and tell them how good they are, so you will earn more gratitude after. I got the feeling this is not your target but instead just shocking everyone at a steady rate. It does not help much unless you got some true magics in your pocket... if so, the destination is Poland.

I pray 5x times! =)

The point UnashamedWeeb is trying to make is:
Asking for donations.
Asking for subscriptions.

What the hell do you think is the reason behind this? Just a random '''now would be a good time to experiment with other revenue gathering methods?'

I like GOG. And I appreciate that notable titles such as ClaIr Obscur and the Tomb Raider series got released here, but all signs just point to the fact that financially they are not doing very well...

I do not think GOG was ever financially doing "good", yet their best time was right in the beginning. Nothing new i say... yet... i as well enjoy "Weltwoche", another company financially rather a fiasco... and still better for me than most other competitors.

Microsofty is a money machine, yet i do not even enjoy their OS (let alone their Xbox)... it is just the thing able to play any game because of support. So, what is the meaning of this? Money does not make a company great, yet if there is to less money it may become dangerous at some point, as this is simply working against "the rules".

If it costs five dollars to vote it's not voting. Maybe next time GOG wants to sell my soul they could at least establishing having one.

Utter gibberish.

It's CDProjekt, with a "t" at the end.

Yeah, I saw afterwards, I just never bothered to go back and correct it.

Smaller margins is what it means to be in a competitive well regulated market. Corporations were never meant to be eternal.

Behemots like Steam, Amazon and others are the anomally. They are gonna eventually get squeezed by antitrust laws world-wide as American soft power wanes. Give it time.

People who think daddy Steam, Epic or whoever they think their corporate savior is will take good care of them make me sick. I have some grudging respect for the people who are upfront about the fact that they don't care if they don't get to keep their games.

In terms of PC gaming, Steam is the dominant player, but in terms of drm-free PC gaming, it is GOG, so their position is not abysmal right now. Believe me, I'd tried other stores (Humble Store, Itch.io, Jast USA, I shop around) and they are ok, but GOG is at least one level above in terms of use experience.

Humble doesn't neatly keep track of your collection in an easy to access format (you need to go back to your purchases), doesn't even clearly indicate when you look at a game that you already own it, plus it isn't committed to drm-free. It will indicate when a game is drm-free, but any game is free to pull out from the drm-free model with no blowback.

Itch.io is just a mess of titles of wildly varying quality (people who complain about bad curation here would be livid over there). A lot of titles are just demos (the actual game is sold only on Steam or some external platform) and they had a big fiasco with nsfw titles lately, pulling out all those titles from their catalog (at least, blocking their sale) and apparently causing payment problems for already sold copies in the process. Also, Itch is technically drm-agnostic, not drm-free. Most of the games sold there are drm-free, but you need to look very carefully. Also, the searching for games by category on Itch is really abysmal. For example, if you just try to look for games on sale, it won't work.

Jast USA is probably the closest to GOG in terms of quality, but they have this super annoying authentication scheme that logs you out every so often (honestly, a little too often, they should relax it a bit) and forces you to get an email to authenticate yourself again, plus they are more of a niche store, specializing mostly in VNs and erotica (I'd say 95% of their games are at least one or both of those things).

And fishing for updates to your game in all the above doesn't provide nearly as good an experience as GOG does (Itchio tells you the last update time of various games, but doesn't provide you an easy way to see all the updates or compare it to the last time you downloaded the game... Jast or Humble doesn't seem to provide anything that I noticed beyond redownloading all your game files and comparing file names and/or checksums).

Plus, all 3 of those companies are American (increasingly for some of us, this matters), making GOG one of the rare non-US stores out there (and the most credible one for drm-games).

There is a lot to like about GOG. They just need to reign in their Galaxy spending (focus more on game preservation instead), clean up their technical debt (still php in 2025? Really?!?!) and yes... get a subscription model going for those who want to support preservation work on games they have in their collection (really, it is an ongoing service and its business model should reflect that)... they should just make sure they support Linux too, otherwise they are losing tons of credibility there if it is Windows-only (which is a moving target controlled by Microsoft).

Modern PHP is a delight to work with, and supremely suitable for pretty much any web-centric site or application which isn't google-scale. Yes, it has warts (soooo many of them!) and there certainly are many usecases for which I wouldn't recommend it, but I can't think of any language where I'd say otherwise. And for many projects, I'd vastly prefer its battery-included approach over the security nightmare of external-dependencies-all-the-way-down from its most popular competitors.

GOG spending time and money to rewrite their APIs and services in a new language - just to keep up with whatever happens to be today's darling of the CV-driven development crowd - would be the height of ineffectiveness.

Eh, just use an LLM and vibe code it for free. Everything will be fine.

/sarcasm

My opinions on this matter closely resemble that of UnashamedWeeb (whom despite being repeatedly challenged, has reliably demonstrated good judgement with regard to comprehending the (largely preventable) 'difficult' long-term fiscal situation in which GOG now finds itself), vv221, as well as a few other forum members.

It is amusing that within section 1.6 of the GOG Patrons terms of use, GOG had considered it necessary to mention: This may certainly become a point of contention in future dealings with select members of such an 'exclusive' club. Even prior to the desperate plea for donations at checkout, and, now, this obvious attempt to secure sustained financial assistance, there had been instances of customers making unreasonable demands, while citing their enormous monetary contributions to GOG.

Anyways, currently, within my mind, there is little doubt that nearly all of the funds garnered through this program will ultimately be used to cover "daily operations", rather than primarily supporting the preservation of games by: "licensing old titles, hiring engineers to make them playable again, and building tools that keep them alive for the long term.".

PHP was hot around the time I myself was a hot young thing around the turn of the millenium. I thought PHP was amazing at the time, but it hasn't aged well (unlike say Javascript, Python or Java which were also around at the time, but tons of people want to work with the former two still and the later somewhat in decline, but still relevant for important projects and they all still get a lot of rock solid integration work being done into most new things). Another example of a language with more staying power is Golang which is somewhat younger, but it is still a 16 years old language and very desirable to work with nowadays still.

With technology, it is not a matter of what is new and hot, but more a matter of picking the winners. Having a good intuition for the king of tools that will have staying power, not just be a fad.

The problem here with php is one of human capital. To attract bright people, you need to either pay them really well or at least give them something interesting to work with. Ideally both.

My understanding is that GOG can't afford to pay crazy salaries and with PHP, they won't be interesting to new grads or most aging developers like me who were around during PHP's prime, but have moved on to greener pastures.

You have a lot of people still doing quick & dirty small to medium website projects with PHP web frameworks and their work definitely has a place (sometimes, you just want a cheap website yesterday), but that place is not working on long term large platforms that need to scale like GOG's.