Wrestling the Steam 'Goliath,' pulling a Nightdive, and seeing off vulture capital: GOG chats the risks and opportunities of its future as a company without CD Projekt

In an industry whose most recent high-profile buyouts cost tens of billions of dollars, the December sale of GOG—for the relatively humble sum of around $25 million—might seem like barely a ripple in the pond. But the impact of the buyout was incommensurate with its cost. For years, GOG has marketed itself as the videogame storefront with values: preserving games, keeping them DRM-free, and letting you actually own them. But values have a tendency to fall by the wayside in the tumult of a corporate sale. Players were concerned.

But perhaps there's comfort to be taken from the fact that GOG's new boss is, quite literally, the same as the old boss. The store was acquired by Michał Kiciński, its original co-founder, under the explicit banner of preserving its integrity and mission statement.

"I think it has a very solid foundation as a company," Kiciński tells PC Gamer. "Good results, a very good brand—known, respected—with very clear values, and customers love it and stand behind it."

Plus, Kiciński has a sentimental attachment: "The less business[-y] reasons [for buying GOG] were: I'm kind of a parent of the company. I invented it back in 2005 together with Marcin Iwiński, and, for a moment, I was the first boss of the company… So I know the business. I know the company, and I didn't want it to be sold to, I don't know how to say it, to some random company." You know, the kind that might see all that chatter about DRM and game preservation as an obstacle to maximising profit.

Gold rush

The sale itself occurred in a remarkably compressed timeframe. "It was rather faster than it usually happens," says Kiciński. "Around September [2025], I found out that CD Projekt planned to sell GOG," recalls Kiciński, "so I joined the process around September." The next few months were a flurry: "It was quite an intensive few months: September, October, November, and especially December—the process was quite competitive."

Kiciński doesn't actually know who he was competing with for ownership of GOG—"We know only that there was one, probably big company competing with me," he says, and "some science shows" it was likely a US one—but he says he was concerned nevertheless. "I've seen some M&A [mergers and acquisitions] processes in the past, and I saw smaller companies being purchased by bigger companies, and then within a year or two disappear from the market.

"The database of customers was taken, the database of products was taken, teams were fired, things like that. I didn't want it to happen to GOG."

Why was CD Projekt looking to sell GOG, a company it owned for 17 years? Part of the reason isn't too hard to guess—GOG's simply not that profitable a part of the company compared to the megabucks the rest of it pumps out. Its net profit of, say, $1.2 million in 2022 might sound very nice to mere mortals like you and me, but CDP as a whole reported profits of over $120 million in 2024. Those are two quite different economic realities.

But there are broader, strategic reasons too. "I think it's become pretty clear for CDPR and GOG that we are pursuing two different strategies," said Maciej Gołębiewski, GOG's managing director. "CDPR has their strategy of developing triple-A games [with] story-rich, immersive worlds and creating franchises around them.

"GOG has its own strategy of bringing the finest visions of modern classics to gamers and creating a community around it… it does not make a lot of sense to keep them together for the long-term."

For Kiciński, "it was a very natural decision to split the company." The sheer difference in scale between GOG and CDP's other operations meant the storefront ended up overshadowed. "When you have two entities in one family, and one is much bigger and more profitable, it's very hard for the smaller entity to get enough attention, and it's very natural that the focus and attention goes into the bigger part of the company."

"I always felt that there was good faith and kindness coming from CDPR," says Gołębiewski, but "it was also visible that they have really ambitious projects, they have a lot on their plates, so… it could be felt that their eyes were on their challenges and on their strategy."

"This [sale] gives the opportunity for GOG to be fully focused on itself, let's say," concludes Kiciński, "and it's not like you are a smaller part of a bigger group, where there's something more important [happening], because a new game is coming out, or something like that."

For its part, CDPR has come out of the deal quite well. The "spirit of the agreement," as Kiciński puts it, is that arrangements between GOG and CDPR remain unchanged, at least for now. That includes the generous royalties CDPR gets from its games sold on GOG: "They have an exceptionally good royalty rate from GOG," says Kiciński, "And that's still the case, because there is no other place in the world where CD Projekt Red has such a big royalties from every game. So they kind of, you know, eat the cake and have the cake."

Future perfect

Loosed from the embrace of a studio giant with $120 million-worth of irons in the fire, what does the next move for GOG look like?

If you've got a plan, Kiciński and co might like to hear it. The rush to secure GOG's purchase over the last few months has left precious little room for grandiose visions of the years ahead. "We've just finished something that was both a marathon and a sprint," says Gołębiewski, "so we'll need to take some time to discuss our strategic options."

Still, that doesn't mean there aren't ideas floating around. No longer under someone else's control, GOG is freer than ever to take risks. "It's natural that in much bigger companies, the risk appetite—especially being a public company—tends to be smaller," says Gołębiewski, "and that removes some of the nimbleness of the company."

Reduced nimbleness does you no favours when your chief competitor is a behemoth like Steam: "Attacking a Goliath in wrestling is not a good idea," says Gołębiewski. "One needs to have good agility."

"One good example of risk-taking," adds Kiciński, "is publishing activity, because publishing activity has a tremendous amount of risk." He's not sure, but Kiciński reckons that risk is what held GOG back from publishing games when it was part of CDPR.

But Kiciński is fairly deep in game publishing—"I'm already in the publishing business through Retrovibe—I have 50% in that company"—and he thinks GOG could make a splash there too. "I'm absolutely open to taking risks in publishing, because I believe that if you have good people—knowing the games, knowing the industry, you can really minimise the risk to an acceptable level."

There are other obvious avenues the store could go down. When I ask if it might be tempted to get more heavily into preservation—not just uploading old games to its storefront and making sure they work, but actively working on them à la Nightdive—Gołębiewski plays his cards close to his chest. "I think that there are not that many companies that do it well," he says (though adds that "Obviously, Nightdive is one of the ones that are doing it well").

In his view, that means "there is space for another good company on that scene. I'm not saying definitely that it will be GOG in 2026, but certainly there is a space there. We are fans of Nightdive's work, but also we believe that competition is always good."

So, doubling down on the things GOG already does and knows, is how that sounds to me, continuing on with the tack that has seen the store, over the past year, lean much harder into its old Good Old Games brand with a focus on preservation and untangling classic rights. Looking forward, that means leveraging connections with developers and rights-holders to explore game publishing and, maybe, turning initiatives like the GOG Game Preservation program into something more dramatic, more remaster-esque.

Will that be enough to topple that old "Goliath," Steam? Well, no, probably not, but neither Gołębiewski or Kiciński are (currently) pitching themselves as out to conquer Gabe Newell's empire. "I think hooking people off of Steam is a byproduct of us trying to provide superior editions—something we call the finest editions of classic games," says Gołębiewski, "If there's a version of the game that's clearly better on GOG, and it has the promise that it will run forever… people will come."

"We are not really putting direct competition to Steam [in the sense] that we have to unhook somebody from Steam," says Kiciński. "Rather, we would like to persuade people, 'Okay, if you have an option to purchase a game—more purchase than rent—and you value having your classic, beloved game to own, then check out GOG. If it's not important, or you have different priorities, go for Steam."

GOG willing

Will GOG make it on its own? It seems up for the challenge, at the very least, and whether it succeeds—if you ask me—is down to just how salient the issues of game ownership and preservation become over the next several years. The issue "comes and goes," says Gołębiewski, "but as long as GOG exists, we are a point of reference on that scale. And if GOG doesn't exist, then, okay, we can actually say that people have given up.

"I think it is a challenge to operate in this industry in this day and age, and still stay true to the values, right? And to the mission. I think, judging by the reception we got last year, it holds up, and we'll see whether it holds up in 2026 and beyond."