Posted September 19, 2021
BroscienceEngineer: I also came to the same conclusion. GOG has 0.3% market share in 2020. Doubled because of CP2077. In 2021, revenue has increased, but the incremental costs have overtaken those revenues. They're operating at law of diminishing returns here. This is also bad news for DRM-free sites like Zoom Platform because GOG is the leading case example of profitability ceiling with its current business strategy and level of service.
People are getting this 8% or 15% GOG market share from case examples of one or two games with 8-15% are GOG users. Those are optimistic outliers. There are hundreds of games that barely get any business. This explains why gamedevs will drop GOG from updates and eventual delistings because they're not getting enough income to deem it worth it.
If people want more update and feature parity, we should be actively evangelizing and recruiting more people to use GOG to becoming significant so that gamedevs can't refuse updates to GOG without garnering negative attention from media outlets. Negative reinforcement from GOG will only go so far. However, people are individually selfish and will just buy Steam versions because they care more about getting the latest games / features / updates instead of committing to DRM-free.
The "Hundreds" of games (to be fair I have no idea the number) that are see same %age sales via GoG are those that release via GoG either much later or with no prior warning. People are getting this 8% or 15% GOG market share from case examples of one or two games with 8-15% are GOG users. Those are optimistic outliers. There are hundreds of games that barely get any business. This explains why gamedevs will drop GOG from updates and eventual delistings because they're not getting enough income to deem it worth it.
If people want more update and feature parity, we should be actively evangelizing and recruiting more people to use GOG to becoming significant so that gamedevs can't refuse updates to GOG without garnering negative attention from media outlets. Negative reinforcement from GOG will only go so far. However, people are individually selfish and will just buy Steam versions because they care more about getting the latest games / features / updates instead of committing to DRM-free.
mqstout: We've been over this. Games that don't have client-based epeen measurement sharing schemes are *superior* versions. You're nearly alone in your perverse crusade to erase games that don't have them.
BroscienceEngineer: Also LOL! Supraland dev got hardly any sales via GoG, because it was months before we saw a GoG release and even then we had awful version parity.
Devs that say "Hey this is coming to GoG" months before release and actively promote GoG as an option are the ones that see the 8ish % sales. I can't say its an absolute across every game that sell like that, but I can say for every dev that replied, the sales via GoG were significant.
As for GoG's claim of 15% market share, all depends on what exactly they're measuring.
It would be counter productive for GoG to measure certain aspects of Gaming, primarily in game currency and micro-transactions. It may seem petty or "padding the figures", but GoG does not operate in that part of the market. Porche wouldn't include budget/mid range cars when presenting their market share to their shareholders.
Remove Games as a service, micro-transactions and the like, and the figure change drastically. I'm sure I read recently that such things now account for 1/2 of the industries wealth.
So yeah, prior to the rise of Epic store, 15% of the "buy to own" PC gaming market, I can see that being close enough.