Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

gog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 574 posts

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#331

Post by murrain »

Spooky23 wrote: post #328
dmantis wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business. I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now. A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers. Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy i…

I wish they had a way to transfer licenses. I have a huge steam library and my son is the biggest user. No big deal when he was 7 but now I just want to play my ancient games… and we kick each other out sometimes! And yeah.. it’s trivial to bypass, but I’d rather have a choice not to.

You can share a Steam library with your family. https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#332

Post by mindcandy »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #294
bendangelo wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the Nintendo Switch became hackable, ie can play any game, Nintendo saw a massive decrease in sales in Spain. Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe. The decrease was at least 40%. The idea that this is a service issue and piracy doesn’t affect sales is just PR speak. If the game is offline, it’ll be pirated a lot.

Both you and GGP make concrete claims but fail to provide evidence. Can anyone cite published sales data or is this all mere conjecture? We've been exposed to what seems like FUD about piracy killing sales since approximately forever - you wouldn't dOwnLoAd a cAR - but seemingly zero actual evidence to date.

My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.

The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.

What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year.

So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation.

Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#333

Post by araes »

rasz wrote: post #307
araes wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost of Sales is eating them alive. They lose ~72% of every PLN/EUR/USD they bring in. Their financial statement is Really confusingly laid out. However, pg 36 has comparison. GOG is actually not THAT tiny of a segment (percentage-wise, absolute EUR / PLN numbers are still small). 49k PLN / 300k PLN for the CD PROJEKT Red and 350k total. Compared to CD PROJEKT RED, insanely horrible cost of sales ratio. July 1st, 202…

Does Cost of sales include game developers cut? because that 143/103 fits their 30-70 split.

Suspicion is you're correct, and is it's probably something like payments or money to developers who have games on the GOG platform. However, the definition in the document is kind of self referential.

"Cost of Sales" is 100% "Cost of goods for resale and materials sold"

and "The Cost of goods for resale and materials sold represents mainly the cost of sales of goods for resale and materials sold via the GOG.COM platform"

Kind of self referential. Everything else is in the CD PROJEKT RED group (Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges).

If your suspicion is correct then that would also imply that historical games are either almost always the same 70/30, or GOG is not really making that much on "historical" games (ie, most of the money is recent indie releases). And, kind of implied that they're not really selling that much. At maybe 10 EUR average, that's only like 1000 games a quarter.

Notably, its really difficult to find anything other than an online article that actually talks about the 70/30 split situation. Google links to Wikipedia for evidence that then links to a 2013 Engadget article. Nothing appears to actually spell out the financial terms on GOG's actual site.

If you happen to know where that type of legalese is on the GOG site, that would actually a helpful ref.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#334

Post by izacus »

Uvix wrote: post #274
izacus wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not true at all, Heroic Launcher supports both cloud saves and achievements. I've been using them for a long time on Deck now. Please don't lie :/

Heroic's cloud save support is flaky; I've had it upload saves to the wrong path so Galaxy on another machine can't download them. As for achievements, I wouldn't say it's had support for "a long time"; they were added in August 2024 (v2.15.1).

So it supports both for a year and a half, what are you nitpicking now exactly?

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#335

Post by codethief »

Never heard of gog.com before (not much of a gamer anymore these days) but it looks really cool! I wonder, though, how exactly do they handle the copyright and licensing topic? Do they negotiate terms separately with every copyright holder? Do they get access to the source code in order to preserve the games and make them fully offline-compatible?

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#336

Post by toast0 »

paxys wrote: post #281
fernie wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20 or whatever OS will be the dominant for PC in 30 or 60 years time.

You can literally run 30 year old software on your Windows computer today.

30 year old Windows software is kind of rough. Tried to get some old games working on my Dad's computer this holiday season. DOS based game is easy. Windows 95 based games are hard... First you almost certainly need winevdm for the installer because the installers were almost always 16-bit; then I was getting errors that I can't run on Windows NT, only Windows 95 is supported, and insufficient ram errors because the memory available is too much.

Found some other options (fan remake) for now, but probably I need to shell out the $3 for a modern port or run a whole emulated windows95. Probably wine with options would also work? SSI games, Allied General and Pacific General.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#337

Post by eviks »

chii wrote: post #310
eviks wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way you sell your disks: find a buyer, send them the game files, they send you the money

> find a buyer this buyer would rather buy off GOG than you, unless you give a significant discount (and even then, the trust is hard to establish). Therefore, even if you might have a legal right to re-sell (which you really don't unfortunately), the actual sale won't happen.

That's not relevant to the issue of "ownership"

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#338

Post by BrenBarn »

mindcandy wrote: post #332
fc417fc802 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both you and GGP make concrete claims but fail to provide evidence. Can anyone cite published sales data or is this all mere conjecture? We've been exposed to what seems like FUD about piracy killing sales since approximately forever - you wouldn't dOwnLoAd a cAR - but seemingly zero actual evidence to date.

My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public. The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at…

> My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.

As an aside, I find this kind of behavior on the part of companies rather irritating. It's like, if you want people to believe that something affects your sales, you need to publicly release the sales data (and do so in a way that people will trust). Otherwise there's no reason for anyone to believe you're not just making stuff up.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#340

Post by super256 »

d-lisp wrote: post #227
super256 wrote: post #51

I bought from GOG once, and downloaded their launcher. Then, I started the game, played for maybe an hour, put my PC to sleep and went to bed. Then, the next next day, I resumed my PC from sleep, closed the game, and because I didn't like it, decided a few days later to request a refund. The game had 26 hours or so logged, because Galaxy has a poor way to log hours. Apparently the interval between game start and game…

You do put your PC to sleep without closing your programs !?

Yes! That's exactly what the sleep mode is for.
Post reply on HN