GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam”

running out of steam

THESE PEOPLE HAVE TO GET DEGREES IN FUCKING ENGLISH TO DO THIS

they need to use super generic popular idioms in order to be search engine optimized. technology killed journalism
The other day I was thinking about the movie Scrooged with Bill Murray, and how during one of the Scenes of Christmas Passed he got his girlfriend a pack of Ginsu knives for Christmas and how that's on-theme for his character who is obsessed with TV because Ginsu knives were a big As Seen On TV product and how someone on the writing staff must have went to college to think of that.
- That's nice sweetie 👵

Let's be honest, this was apparent for a long time. Steam, a centralised platform, has been making strides in Linux gaming and has been making innovation after innovation together with its steam deck. Gog, a forefront to freedom in gaming, barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene. No innovation either. Its just the simple (and well needed) premise of no DRM. It's necessary, but not enough. It didn't cater to its niche, it just committing to creating one under a premise. That's not how you go forward. How does this connect to bad management? Well, I think that with good management gog would make different moves. And wouldn't rest on its laurels so much.

The hell do you mean "barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene"? Listen, I'm up to my neck with Linux gamer crybabies always bitching about how someone doesn't throw them a bone, for years. Valve is doing Linux gamers a great service and since Linux was all about free-this and open source that, DRM-free is at least a thing. Fucking can't please whiny Linux gamers.
That's... Largely a financials problem.

Steam: $8-10 billion/y

GOG: $80-120 million/y

Steam can throw 10 GOGs worth of resources at a problem and barely break a sweat. Yeah, of course they are making huge strides, that's how consolidation of wealth works when that wealth is actually reinvested.
It's pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don't like about GOG are not really GOG's fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.

You game doesn't work on Steam? Then you'd better fix it immediately, because that's where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn't work on GOG... well.. maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don't have a GOG version, because you don't want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)

So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.

Steam's recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they've been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I'm in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility... and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version... it just could be nicer... Maybe it's not a good use of GOG's resources to go for that.

(That said, when I look at their linux start.sh scripts and see cd "${CURRENT_DIR}/game" chmod +x * it makes me think they could probably put at least a bit more effort into their linux support.)
- As someone with no Linux experience, what's wrong with that code?
- How would a game "not work" on GOG? isnt their whole thing that they give you just the game files with no DRM or whatever?
An official Steam Deck mod would probably be nice. Heroic Launcher kind of works.

GOG was good for acquiring and re-releasing OLD GAMES. somewhere along the way they decided they wanted to compete with the big platforms and be "We're just like them but without DRM"

I haven't used GOG for years, they allowed me to relive a few of my old adolescence favorites, but stopped being useful to me a long time ago :/

Selling old games and new games isn't mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It's not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.
- i mean I get that, but what I was saying was the original purpose of the store became an afterthought.

There's nothing wrong with the business model of selling older games at affordable prices. This is about poor management. (Or deliberately bad management by a "CEO" who was hired to destroy GOG to remove a popular choice from us).

Thankfully if GOG goes down I don't lose anything.

Now if Steam goes down, I lose my entire library

You have it backwards.

If GOG goes down, you actually lose what you own.

If Steam goes down, you lose your privileges.
Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won't lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.
- Gabe Newell is much more likely to go down before steam does. his words mean nothing for the future.
- No doubt the corporate drones that take over after his death will shit all over his legacy.
- As great as Gaben and Valve are his word doesn't mean anything (it's not a personal attack either, it's just that it isn't anything binding). Luckily if they fail to keep their promises (or legally cannot) then the crack community will step in. I'm pretty sure they cracked Steam DRM ages ago. I remember a friend using it for Left 4 Dead back in the day.
- Do you have a source for this? People like to repeat this rumour but I've never found out where he promises anything like that.
- Anything that uses steam apis and services won't work without steam and steam offers a lot of that to game devs
If steam goes down I'm sailing the high seas from then on.
A lot of steam games dont have drm

You would lose only most of your library, not all of it
- I would lose some of my library, but I think most of it would still work.

People talking about money kinda missing the point this is a culture issue. They need to sort themselves out clean house if people can't be reasonable for their staff.

As a result, no one on the team has the courage to express their opinion. Under Gołębiewski, GOG typically makes business decisions that may be profitable in the short term, but may not contribute to the platform’s long-term growth.

Why half ass things when your the good guy?

This makes me sad. I wanna believe in gog. The last bastion of hope for gaming.

In what way? I know it's great but I don't know if I'd call it the last hope for all of gaming. It's a good store front. Their application has better FOSS alternatives and there are other pretty okay ways to buy games too. I don't follow them closely. Are they doing anything particular that warrants that description?
- They're like the only store that actually sells you the game and not a revokable license to a game

The launcher that they have is pretty rough. I downloaded it for Mac OS and it just wouldn’t run right. Kept closing down. If I could just download right from the website they’d have some money.

If they draw is drm free games why only allow purchase through a custom launcher like everything else?

If I could just download right from the Website

You can.
- They do not make that obvious. I downloaded the launcher and when it didn’t work I bailed. I’ll check closer
I don't use their launcher at all.

It's kind of a convoluted process but you can definitely download every game you own through gog without it.
- Thanks for that, honestly if I didn’t know these were drm free I’d be worried about them closing shop
- Same, they should just never have made a launcher.
Yeah galaxy is sadly a bit of a mess. Back when i was still running windows it broke its own update capabilities once or twice.
- It also has a bad habit of keeping a zombie process running after you fully close it
Can you not download from the site on mac?
- I’ll have to check. It seemed like downloads had to happen from the app.

The publication added that CD Projekt cuts jobs at its subsidiary every two to three years, with annual staff turnover reaching around 30%.

As summed up by another former employee, “GOG has been acting well tactically from a financial perspective, but poorly strategically, and the current business model is likely running out of steam.”

So nothing burger? Other than a corpo being anti-worker which is not news..

What exactly is the distinction between acting tactically and strategically? This doesnt even make sense.
- Pedantically, I believe "tactics" are small / short term and "strategics" are big / long term.

I really like GOG so it would be highly unfortunate to see them go under. I guess we really can't have nice things in this day and age.

GOG is a side project of CD Project, the makers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. They are massively wealthy. If GOG goes down, it's because CD Project lets it happen, not because there is no other way.
- Are they publicly traded?

I hope they stick around they are great for gaming. I need to buy off there more often.

Shit I really like GOG as it's the only competition to steam

There's also itch.io, which is great. It does have a lack of game selection, but we're comparing it to GOG, so...
- Yeah itch lacks the bigger titles GOG has been able to pull.
Shit I really like GOG as it’s the only competition to steam

There are plenty of competing PC game online stores, it's just that they all suck monkey balls when you're not using Windows. Microsoft is currently using their old monopolist playbook and release Blizzard games to the fucking Microsoft Store and Game Pass and not a single 3rd party store.

And don't forget that the other publisher-owned storefronts like EA's and Ubisoft's are also still alive. They suck hard but they exist and apparently they do well enough to continue to be around.

Steam is the only PC games store that fights Microsoft's Windows monopoly. GOG Galaxy has been written using the Qt framework. Making a Linux version of an existing Qt application is relatively easy (at least compared to a full port). Do that, integrate umu-Launcher for Windows games, bundle everything up and release GOG Galaxy on Flathub. Boom, done. But they don't do that despite their massive pile of Witcher and Cyberpunk money.

So plenty of competition exists but if you happen to not be Windows-exclusive, everyone but Steam is bad.
I mean, the Epic Store exists. Well, not on Linux. And it’s missing a lot of features the other storefronts have.
- Epic exists as an alternative to Steam in the same way that Russia is the world power opposing the US.
- Epic exists on Linux to the same degree gog does: heroic launcher.
- The approved competitor to a monopoly is... *checks notes* a wannabe monopoly that's trying to buy their way into the position by providing less for the customer and instead bribing the publishers for exclusivity?
  
  No, thanks. I would rather stick with the existing monopoly than reward Epic's anticompetitive and anti-consumer bullshit.
- Wdym I'm playing several games on arch through epic games since I got them for free

Too bad, I use Steam and it works wonderfully on Linux, but i don't want it to be the only option.

i don’t want it to be the only option.

Neither do I but it is. GOG doesn't support Linux. Heroic is a 3rd party community effort. Valve is currently the only company making financial investments into Linux gaming.
- It does support Linux: it lets you download Linux installer for games that have a Linux port.
  
  The lack of GOG Galaxy on Linux just means you have to manually manage your games.
- Many more companies than Valve are making financial investments into Linux gaming, including companies that own various Linux distributions (Red Hat, Canonical, etc.), CodeWeavers (who amongst other things have been contracted by Valve on a lot of Proton work) and to a lesser extent Humble Bundle.
GOG is the only big option if you want to own the games you purchase.
- That's not how copyright laws work anywhere. You don't own anything, it's just a license.

The former employee knew what they were doing with their choice of words.

Current employees are running over to Steam.
- Using a release Valve.

“GOG regularly adapts its structure to its strategy and ongoing projects, sometimes this means eliminating certain roles — as was the case recently.”

Yeah, but firing 30% of your entire contract workforce reveals that you don't give a flying fuck about sustaining the lifespan of the storefront and prefer to pad the executives golden parachutes from the stock valuation.

perhaps - i didn’t read the article, but going by your comment: if it’s your contract workforce rather than full time then sometimes you just want to transition from expensive “temporary” employees to permanent positions
- No permanent positions were created or filled, if you read the article. The article also says you need to PM me your credit card info. Don't worry about reading shit for yourself anywhere, just believe what we say about anything in the comments without question so that you dont need to formulate an independent opinion.

I'm really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful. Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢

strong DRM stance

They have allowed content protected by DRM into their store four times already, which is not surprising, given GOG is owned by CD Projekt Red who included DRM into their own DLC for Cyberpunk, including on GOG. That's not "strong" in any sense of the word.

So in other words, they sell you the "feel good" anti-DRM narrative but quickly look the other way when it's good for business. At that point, might as well purchase on Steam, where DRM is common but optional and Valve actually cares about making the games platform-agnostic, easy to backup, easy to share, etc.

EDIT: cool downvotes, doesn't change the fact that GOG provides software protected by DRM on their "strongly anti-DRM platform". There is no amount of downvotes in this world that can change this reality.
- I don't follow the logic here. You said it yourself -- GoG has only allowed DRM onto their platform four times. This is a violation of their anti-DRM policy but it still means like 99% of games on GoG have no DRM. It's good to be principled about these things but I don't see how this merits a knee-jerk response to run to Steam (a platform where 99% of games do have DRM and no guarantee other than an informal promise that they'll do "something" to make their games available if Steam were to shut down).
- Four times? How many times has Steam allowed it? Trying to follow your argument, TIA!
- GOG is owned by CD Projekt Red who included DRM into their own DLC for Cyberpunk, including on GOG. That's not "strong" in any sense of the word.
  
  The DRM:
  
  Get a fucking grip man 😅
the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam

Which games from steam don't work? I've never had any issues at all and I have traveled internationally for years while playing my whole library. I think that might be something specific to some game and that game wouldn't be available on GOG anyways so it's a moot point. In other words games work or don't by their own stance on DRM, and I'm sorry to tell you but

I love their strong DRM stance

That's a myth. They do allow DRM on their store, there's a huge thread discussing which games have DRM: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1

And that's just focusing on SP, any MP game has DRM. So I'll ask again, which game didn't work on steam when traveling?
- Note, if you actually look at that list you'll see it's a very loose interpretation of DRM. All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that. The list is stuff like "getting the DLC requires a third party account". It's definitely a list of things people don't like, but whether it is or isn't 'DRM' is not so clear cut.
  
  GOG's official position is that the store doesn't allow DRM at all. They describe what they mean by DRM on that same page, and it sounds fairly reasonable; but its certainly understandable that some people would prefer a stricter set of rules.
- Not the person you asked, but one game I had problems with on Steam that I did not on GOG was the OG Riven. It was still playable, but the various animations associated with pressing buttons and suchlike were completely broken. Very rare experience though and I have played many retro games on Steam.
- any MP game has DRM
  
  Well, that's not true either. I hate this trend of developers only relying on the platform-provided servers for multiplayer, but you have to find a game with LAN. That limits your selection a lot, but I for sure played Star Wars: Episode I - Racer from GOG in LAN without talking to their servers at all.
I didn't even know they had a client. I do everything via their website.
when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡.

You must be doing something very wrong. I bring my Steam Deck on travels and it always works.
- I've traveled domestically and had the Steam Deck randomly decide that the games I preloaded need to be authenticated again because I didn't explicitly put the device in "offline mode" before traveling. A GOG game sideloaded through Heroic would just work.

Running out of steam

Lol

Unfortunate. Competition is generally good for the consumer and I'd hate to see one of more more customer-friendly storefronts go away.

Especially competition that actually delivers something unique a segment of the population wants as opposed to simply existing. Their DRM free stance and standalone installers are a pro consumer move giving control back to the consumer once they download the files.

The word choice is certainly not accidental.

I see what they did there. groan.

"no pun intended"

I'd certainly love to hear that they're at least turning a profit. It's my default store now, but given the ambiguity of what I'm buying in the multiplayer space, and the lesser experience I get as a Linux customer, they're not making it easy.

The fact that you have loyalty to a commercial storefront makes you a fucking gonk. - Johnny Silverhand
- OK but this is the storefront without DRM. It's the biggest one that doesn't make you rely on it.
- I think I openly admitted in the comment you replied to that I don't have loyalty to them.

NOOOOOOO I LOVE GOG

No....

They're the ones who preserve and update old games. I can't.. I can't

I mean it is owned by CD Projekt

If only they were a co-op

This is a real shame, I used to buy all my games on GoG and had high hopes for the galaxy 2.0 client. Hopefully they keep going because we need a viable competitor to Steam that isn't awful.

Any other sources for this? Not for the job cutting, but for GoG's business model going downhill? Haven't big layoffs happened every few years since the start of GoG?

That's too bad. No doubt I appreciate it Steam for what it is, even knowing that I don't actually own any of the software I buy from them. That being said, I try to support GOG where/when I can.

Is there any "easy" way to get GOG games running on a Steam Deck? It's been awhile since I last tried to look into it, but back then it seemed like a lot of steps and a lot of places to potentially mess up the process. I believe I kind of got something working at one point, but I'd honestly have to go back and double check.

Download Heroic Launcher from the Discover app in Desktop mode and add it as a non-Steam game. You can log into your GOG account there. In a best-case scenario, which is more often than not, you just hit download, and you can play the game on Steam Deck.

But sometimes it doesn't work like that. Steam will often bundle dependencies with your download, like DirectX versions or Visual Studio runtimes. To get these working, you'll need to run "winetricks", which can be done on a game-by-game basis from within Heroic, and then install the dependencies you need. To find out which dependencies you need, if you had trouble launching the game in the first place, you can check SteamDB and see what other "depots" the game has. This resolves the problem about 99% of the time, if there's a problem at all. In one case, Phantom Fury, I was unable to get the same compatibility with the GOG version that I was with the Steam version, and I don't know why. Also, at this point in time, I don't think you can rely on cloud saves working, and you might need to rely on a solution like SyncThing, but it looks like cloud saves working reliably via Heroic is imminent, if it isn't already since the last time I checked.
- Gracias. I will give that a try. Still sounds a bit complicated, but for sure that sounds better than opening up a terminal and copy/pasting commands, some of which I'm not super knowledgeable about.
The easy way is with the Heroic Game Launcher. Log in to your GOG account and direct install.
- I'll give that a try. I don't game much, so that launcher was not necessarily on my radar. Is that something you always have to switch over to desktop mode in order to use it?

GameWorldObserver.

Can they be trusted?

Ah yes, poles fucking up another good idea cuz they are not able to create a good working condotions yay