CD Project Red’s digital game storefront GOG has not been doing well recently due to financial losses.
According to The Verge, it will be changing direction to focus on a ‘handpicked selection of games’.
“Regarding GOG, its performance does present a challenge, and recently we’ve taken measures to improve its financial standing,” CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz told in an investors meeting.
“First and foremost, we’ve decided that GOG should focus more on its core business activity, which means offering a handpicked selection of games with its unique DRM-free philosophy. In line with this approach, there will be changes in the team structure.”
According to Nielubowicz, developers working on the services online have been transferred to other projects.
This may not come as much of a surprise as GOG has been struggling financially. In a financial report for the latest quarter, it found that the storefront had a net loss of around $1.14 million. That would mean it had a total loss of around $2.21 million in the last three quarters compared to $1.37 million profit.
GOG is a storefront whose main selling point was that it would sell more obscure hard-to-find games without any DRM. There was no launch software with GOG you just bought the game and download it to your computer.
The storefront would evolve into a more all-purpose storefront that sold CD Project Red games like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 alongside more will know third-party games as well as a new live service called ‘GOG Galaxy’.
Despite these efforts, GOG has continued to see a decline in profits which in 2019 led to the laying off of 10% of their staff. The main reason sighter for this decline is competition from other storefronts with Steam, in particular, holding dominance in the PC gaming space.