The data pretty much clarifies that whenever CDP releases its own game here, GOG sees double YOY profits.

I'm confident GOG won't be going anywhere as long as CDPR continues with their quality releases here. And they're always mentioned as a risk mitigation in case CDPR can't get their product to market to third-party vendors anyway.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jlDSN47Q_k1mZ4KyiTrJ0z8yWIdU7P-ENYEW8P_nShk/

FY 2023 results are out now:
https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/result-center/
GOG made ~233 million zloty in 2023, and had a profit of 10 million zloty, so revenues were nearly 50 million zloty higher than last year and nearly double profit.

More context:

1. Within past 5 years, this is their 2nd best year of net profit margins at 4.4% (2020's net profit margin was 6.0% with CP77).

2. Within past 5 years, this is their 3rd best year of adding more games to the library year over year at 15.1% (2022's # games was +15.6% in 2022 from 2021 and +19% in 2021 from 2020).

3. Within past 5 years, this is their best year of controlling their selling costs to OPEX ratio at 74.3%.

4. Within past 5 years, this is their 3rd best year of captured market share at 0.160%. Valve roughly controls 83.9% and Epic controls 2.7% market share of the PC digital distribution market. That means Valve's revenues is 157x higher and Epic's revenue is 17x higher than GOG's.

5. Within past 5 years, this is their 2nd lowest staff count at ~155. Compare to their lowest of 146 in 2022 and their highest of 214 at the end of 2020.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jlDSN47Q_k1mZ4KyiTrJ0z8yWIdU7P-ENYEW8P_nShk/

---

Check out p.62+ of their board management report for number breakdowns and explanations:

- Revenue: up driven from primarily CP77: Phantom Liberty and Baldur's Gate 3
- Selling costs: up from increased sales and payment processing costs; was driven down through many initiatives
- Other operating costs (including minimum income guarantees for games): increased 62% YOY
- Tax: GOG is still fighting a tax case of owing the Polish gov't 2.64M PLN back in 2016 as of end of last year

Stupid question: the 155 employees are CDPR's and not gog's alone, right?

Thanks for the informative post!

2023 H1 Management Board Report p.9 - https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2023/08/management-board-report-on-cd-projekt-group-activities-in-h1-2023.pdf

CDP Group: 1287 employees end of June 2023
- 1101 in CDPR
- 155 in GOG
- 9 in Spokko
- 32 in The Molasses Flood

Thanks, you're too kind. I couldn't believe gog really has 155 employees @_@.

Thanks for the summary!

Thanks. I wondered if this was basically the case, PL still selling well.

Like others have suggested in the past, I'd like to see money spent on site improvements, but minimum guarantees also remain exciting to me

That assertion that EGS only has 2.7% marketshare seems quite nonsensical to me. I'm pretty sure they actually have upwards of 20%.

And GOG "adding more games to the library" is not necessarily a good thing, or a "best" thing, since the quality, or more accurately, almost total lack thereof, of most games released on GOG is not good.

So GOG adding a larger number of bad games to the catalog makes GOG a worse store than before, not a better one.

For example, one of the main reasons for the increase in number of games being added is the endless amount of low quality AO games that have been and are still being released on GOG since they started to allow that a few years ago.

That number is not about users own games there or games are "somehow" "distributed" to "customers".

It is about real sales to costumers and the revenue in the end.

Epic might be able to get high numbers of users by giving away free candy more or less each week.
They might be able to generate some sales by simply giving away 10 bugs coupons in sales.

But in reality Epic store had and still has a massive problem to turn those account it got by free candy into hard money earned.

So yeah, epics "share" in users, epics "share" in games added to accounts might be higher then 2,7%.
Epics share in real sales?
There is a reason Epic is cutting costs these days and there is a reason why Epic never stopped throwing out free candy.
It is very unsure if Epic actually makes profit with the Epic store.


And even if you don't like to hear it.
Those AO games do sell. If they wouldn't, they wouldn't be here. Instead, new publishers of AO games are added.

If you know something I don't, feel free to share data and calculations and I can make the data more accurate.

I took Epic Game Store's reported revenue from their site. I divided every store's revenue by Newzoo's estimated $38.4B USD PC digital games market to obtain that market share. Even if the estimate PC digital games market was incorrect, all the stores' market share would still remain the same because they're being divided by the same constant.

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-games-store-2023-year-in-review
https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/video-games-in-2023-the-year-in-numbers

The biggest headscratcher with my calculations is Valve because they don't report Steam's revenue. But you have Wolffire Games suing them claiming them they have 75% market share, VG Insights claiming Steam made only $8.8B last year, and Microsoft estimating they've only made $6.5B.

I think the absolute number estimates are based off their gross profit after they've paid back the ~70% of their sales revenue back to devpubs in order for that 75% market share to make sense as per the lawsuit filing. So if Valve made $8.8B USD last year, then they would've had $20-30B USD going into their store, but not entirely sure. So Valve's market share can be anywhere from 25.2-83.9%. The accuracy I'm more confident in is that Steam is making some three* magnitudes of revenue more than GOG. This is enough of a difference for anyone to make rough generalizations with this info when comparing discrepancies between the two stores.

https://www.classaction.org/media/wolfire-games-llc-et-al-v-valve-corporation.pdf
https://vginsights.com/steam-market-data
https://www.pcgamer.com/microsoft-would-buy-valve-if-opportunity-arises-said-phil-spencer-in-leaked-email/ As for the rest of your comment, I think more games being added to GOG's library is a better indicator of both GOG's ability to add more partners and the overall strength of devpubs' DRM-free sentiments towards GOG. It was never about the quality of games of GOG's library.