GOG.com in the Red - CD Projekt Announces Return to the Roots
GOG.com brings considerable losses. Its managers believe that they will be able to turn the trend around if they return to their original business of providing a range of carefully selected DRM-free games.
Yesterday, We informed you about the lower than expected financial results achieved by CD Projekt in the third quarter of 2021. It turns out that it is not only the "maintenance" of Cyberpunk 2077 but also of the digital distribution platform GOG.com.
The store, which is supposed to offer hard-to-find titles without DRM protection, recorded only a small increase in revenue during the period in question. provided the company with PLN 41.8 million, which is a result only 3% better than that achieved in Q3 2020. Comparing this figure with the generated costs, GOG.com brought a net loss of PLN 4.75 million. For comparison, in the same period of the previous year, the Polish company was also in the red, but only by PLN 130 thousand.
If we also take into account that from January to September GOG.com has been in a progressing deficit (recording a net loss of PLN 9.21 million), while at the same time in 2020 it provided a profit of PLN 5.7 million, one may begin to wonder how the service is still functioning. The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, the profits from which help compensate for the losses, have played an important role in this.
Nevertheless CD Projekt's owners came to the conclusion that GOG.com needs a return to the roots. As the company's vice president for finance, Piotr Nielubowicz, put it:
"First and foremost, we decided that GOG should focus more on its core business, which means providing access to a carefully curated selection of DRM-free games. In line with this approach, there will be changes to the team's structure."
This means that some developers working on the online features for GOG.com will be assigned to new tasks. What's more, the store is to be excluded from the so-called " Gwent Consortium", a cross-departmental project aimed at developing the card game derivative of the mini-game from the third Witcher. In other words, GOG.com will stop both sharing the development costs of this game and the profits it generates. It's hard to predict how these changes will affect the digital store formerly known as Good Old Games.
