Wouldn't you expect the sentence 'making the most money in 3rd party revenue in our history' should be followed by :

"we made historical profits"

not

"15 million pln in profits vaporized year over year"

Lets also not forget that due to Epic that's forced GOG to reduce their margins as well. Meaning those benefits are going to be offset a lot by the fact that they're no longer taking 30%

As far as last year, yea.. no. Epic didn't even announce their store until December of 2018. Any impacts from Epic would be now, not then. And GOG doesn't have a straight margin with devs like Epic and Steam does. For older games that GOG has to put work into, those margins will likely still be 30%. GOG even made that clear.

You seem to leave out that those were record profits, at a time when the Witcher 3 was still at its peak and GWENT was a new and novel thing. Add that currency rates were as good as they have been in the last 10 years.

It was 4.11 PLN to 1 USD in Jan 2017 (monthly average)
It peaked at 4.21 PLN to 1 USD in Dec 2016 (the highest it has been going back 10 years)
Of course they were greatly profitable...

It was 3.42 PLN to 1 USD in Jan 2018 (monthly average)
Which dropped to 3.37 PLN to 1 USD in Feb 2018 - the lowest it's been since Oct 2014

It's not hard to see what effect that might have on their profits...

By Nov, the PLN has returned to 3.78 PLN to 1 USD and been hovering there since which should make the March 21 report interesting now that the currency seems to have stabilized at a middle ground.

Yes so again in the 3 best quarters of GOGs 3rd party revenue, and their existing best case scenario of 30% cut, GOG lost money for 3 quarters straight.

Ok so lets try to do some future math. Lets say we take this incredible Q1-Q3 and add 20% growth in total revenue for a theoreticaly Q1-Q3 2019. combine this with a new reduced 15% margin. Doing so the revenue grows to 111,222. But the 15% margins now mean their gross profit would be 16,683.

Lets assume GOG reduces overall expenses by 30% via staff reductions and removal of fair pricing, expenses go from from 30750 to 21,525.

16,683 - 21,525 = -4,722

They increase revenue by 20% and decrease expenses by 30% they would still be losing 4,722 PLN in this theoretical Q1-Q3. You only get to the break even point unless GOG manages to find 50% in expenses somewhere to hack away at.

Thus we see that increases in 3rd party revenue and massive amounts of cost cutting, are rendered moot because of the reduction in margins. Not only does GOG have to grow revenue year over year, which given the past 2 years seems unlikely given that since the witcher 3's release revenues are down each year, and Thronebreaker basically was a dud meaning minimal halo effect. But they also have to find close to 50% in expenses to be able to even break even.

Ergo where does

1) GOG find 20-30% in revenue growth other than "please cd projekt release Cyberpunk".
2) GOG find 40-50% in expenses to reduce

You keep doing it. GoG has had just 3 quarters of negative growth and two of those quarters are traditionally not very good. That's it. And during that time, they have spent money developing networking capabilities that might help them develop matchmaking services for some old games. Wouldn't it be nice if someday GoG could restore some multiplayer functionality to the old catalog using this development?

Otherwise, they have been profitable continuously for years. But here you are projecting off the worst quarters in GoG's history and crying that the "sky is falling".

First off, Epic Game Store is hardly competition for GoG. They carry about 30 games and that is all. Their focus seems to be to undercut the market on first day releases to make their profits. A 12% cut isn't going to make them money on old games nor marginal indie games. As such, I highly doubt GoG is going to cut their revenues in half, down to 15%...

Not to mention the fact you seem to be ignoring the sudden rise in the value of the PLN which hurt them a lot. The problem for them is they do most of their business in dollars. Things should be better with the PLN starting to stabilize as of November.

And meanwhile, their sister division, CDPR, is doing perfectly fine. They can hover around even for awhile. You are acting as if they are in real trouble when the GoG division has made a profit of 11,000,000 PLN over the last 7 reported quarters...

What a bunch of nonsense. It's clear you keep moving the goalpost and trying to get yourself out of the corner that you have backed yourself into because other people have a much better understanding of the situation than you do.

Not playing the what if game with arbitrary numbers.

I have to say that he's not interested in any of what GOG has to offer, let alone GOG being a competitor to Steam. So you need look no further than his post #1228. All of his talk for days now amounts to GOG basically becoming another Steam keys reseller.

And again what goalpost am I moving. The idea of 'our growth is great' is meaningless if your profits are in the toilet.

Again I gave you an utterly best case scenario

1) add 20% revenue YOY to a supposed 'awesome year' which again is utterly generous given that there's literally nothing that would be pushing a 20% YOY growth in revenue
2) decrease YOY expenses by 30% to simulate removal of fair pricing and firing employees which agian is very generous
3) propose theoretical reduction in GOG's margins from a known 30% to 15%.

So if we add 20% to a 'block buster year' by your description, and reduce expenses by 30%. GOG STILL loses money YOY.

Please feel free to tell me what 'goalpost' is being moved. GOG is taking less take in 2019. This is a known fact since it is the given explanation by GOG itself, as to why fair pricing was removed. Unless of course you insist GOG is lying about that. In which case shouldnt you be perhaps screaming at GOG for removing a program under false pretenses?

So again not onlyh is GOG bleeding money in a 'block buster 2018' but in a 'best case scenario 2019' they're losing even more money.

GOG had 3 years ot be a 'competitor to steam' 3 years of wasting their opportunity wiht GOG galaxy and the wticher 3.

They had a chance to actually do that and failed spectacularly, with a client that can charitably be called 'steam from 5 years ago', and with no Steamworks equivalent API system to realistically make a dent into Steam.

Now their business model is under fire. The Witcher3 well is drying out as shown by YOY decreases in revenue. Thronebreaker which woudl have been a good stop-gap measure before Cyberpunk is a dud. Now GOG is bleeding money, and doesn't have a 1st party title to fall back on for revenues. This is on top of Epic forcing their 30% margins to be reduced which came at the worst possible time, inbtween the releases of Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk and with the failure of THronebreaker.

GOG needs to cut expenses. Their best bet woudl be to stop their gate keeping of games and patches and support of games. Getting more titles on to GOG is a better way to increase sales, they already have the CDN infrastructure so adding games to sell is minimal cost increase but provides for revenue growth. Again GOG might only sell 100 copies of Grimoire, but that's still $1000 in revenue they're NOT making. Now multiply that by other titles they keep refusing. And you can get revenue growth from lots of small titles, rather htan relying on a minimum floor of revenue per game before it gets approved. You don't have to 'accept everything' but even a slightly looser protocol means more content, means more sales. Especially if the supposed 'way to make money' is to 'be niche'.

Again accept more titles, which will bring more revenue. Get rid of being 'outsourced tech support' for your games, no one else does this and its killing their bottom line both from a revenue and expense perspective. Your USP can still be basically DRM free.

Since they're already being gate keepers, a better business that fits that model woudl be to become publishers like Humble and GMG.

GOG needs a better business straegy than 'we hope cyperbunk comes out in 2019'

Grimoire just cracked 800 wishlist votes!

Why is it not here yet? Instead of focusing on the game, people keep whining about Cleve. They keep saying things like "No wonder gog refused this game, you wouldn't want *that guy* in your forum!" Guess what? Cleve already posted in this forum. In this very thread. The world didn't end. Neither will the world end if gog fulfills those 800 wishlist votes and releases a game that people actually want here.

Growth means lots if the reason you're in the toilet is one time capital expenditures. So if they have a 20% growth in revenue that is sustained and an expense which is essentially a one time expense, say hiring a bunch of contractors to help with a major development contract. Then they could have a loss for a couple quarters due to temporary increases in expenses but come out ahead in the end. That shouldn't be hard to follow.
Even if wishlist votes were the sole contributor to their decision making process, does 800 votes even crack the top thousand games on the wishlist?

Haha, I'm pretty sure Cleve has burned that bridge by this point. That thread on RPGcodex is a great example of how not to treat potential business partners.

While he does come across as someone who might hold a grudge for quite some time that's still just speculation. Always better to hear from someone themselves whether or not bridges have been irrevocably burned.

I'm still up for purchasing Grimoire on GoG, should it come here eventually.
Will buy 2 copies, in fact .

That's not quite what that expression means. When I say he's burned that bridge I don't mean he's bearing a grudge, I mean GOG will be. Whatever reason they didn't want to sell Grimoire before, they're almost certainly not going to want to go into business with him now.

I don't know about that.
Of the two involved parties I'd consider GoG the more likely one to be professional, let bygones be bygones and make the first step towards renegotiations. That is IF there's actually any bad blood between the parties in the first place.