GOG.com has fired a significant number of employees
 

Slow day for news?

I've read about it elsewhere - it's not anything significant and is business as usual. According to GOG it's about restructuring where a few were fired some new hired and currently GOG wants to hire 20ish people, dunno for what jobs though.
In other words, if GOG was trying to launch whatever phone rubbish, decided they don't need it and now fired phone developers, ah, well, tough luck for them.

There is however some suspicious source that says GOG is in financial problems. Dunno nothing about that, on the other hand, was there any time when GOG wasn't having financial problems? Was there any time when you didn't have financial problems? It's not EA.

Spring is coming, companies are flushing employees to make their finances looks better on the short term.

*yawn*

Saying that, if those digital retailers can't even turn a profit with 30% cut because of low sales in a month, how the hell are Discord and Epic going to survive long term?

So GOG fired twelve workers and everyone freaks out? Seriously come back to me when they lay off 800 employees like Activision Blizzard,and other larger companies.

In the meantime the reddit threads are hilarious as they all spout doom and gloom.

Lol are you serious comparing gog with activision

Yes because the internet replies make it sound like its the end of GOG.

800 vs 12 whats worse I wonder?:p

Anyway Joxer's reply above is correct.

It's perfect as a small-scale nostalgia hub - but that's about it.

If they seriously hired to compete with the big boys, which I kinda doubt, then I'm not exactly surprised they have to scale back.

But who knows, really.

800 or 12 only means something within the context of the size of the thing. I have no idea how many people worked for GOG in a capacity that relates to these people - and I'm (almost) sure none of you have a clue, either - as that's not really your thing :)

I can already hear the Googling starting, though.

I got a nice news headline for everyone.:biggrin:

"GOG Fires 12 Employees Internet Overreacts Again"

It's hard to know if it's an overreaction with zero insight.

Of course, it's easy if you operate from an agenda that's not about trying to figure out the truth.

If there is zero insight available, it definitely is an overreaction.

It would be interesting to know how many employees gog has - i.e, what percentage or type of employees were layed off. 12 seems like a small number but I would not be surprise if gog was in order of 50 to 100 so it might be as many as 15%…

Well the article had a lot of details; the store (gog.com) is barely breaking even the last couple of months so they were adjusting head-count to match decrease revenue. The mentioned that the recent witcher game didn't sell that well (not surprising) and that epic/discord are putting pressure to on the industry to cut % per sale. This could be harsh on gog since a lof of their games are 'good old games' at low prices.

I haven’t bought anything from gog in probably a year or maybe 2. Come to thing of it I don’t even remember what my login is.

I only buy old games from them and I just don’t have any time for older games anymore. My backlog is full of newer games I don’t have time to play.

Those are all fair points, yet to see whether those layoffs are significant, we'd need the rough number of employees.

Posted on GOG Forums - https://www.gog.com/forum/general/co…_9b7f5/post199

What is the FPP program ?

Fair Price Program - https://www.pcgamer.com/gog-is-endin…-a-larger-cut/

All this doom and gloom is because of Kokatu.

Link -https://kotaku.com/facing-financial-…lea-1832879826

Other sites just picked up on the news.

This was the first year I bought a game on GOG in a long time. The process was done fairly well, but yea, it could be smoother, not a huge fan of the GOG Galaxy client thingie. In any case, I doubt this is anything more than a small blip of "restructuring" or whatever the corporate speak is these days of trying to run a business and save money. There is still a market of gamers out there who don't want DRM in their games, in my view.

Not many probably
https://i.imgur.com/9sf1BYT.jpg

also giving away free games if you got them on steam surely wasnt a smart move financially

Well, the nice thing about GOG is you can download the games at any time, DRM free, so I guess that is a nice perk if people are worried about the store being in trouble or failing.

But there are many gamers who do care about DRM, namely - they hate it with a passion - that I have seen make comments on various game forums, that I've seen anyway. They are out there.

That said, it is surely a niche market. GOG will never be able to be as big as steam.

I think that most people would prefer no DRM - if it were a straight choice, and that being the only differentiating factor. I just think that it's a concern that's outweighed in most people's minds by the convenience and dominance of Steam.

For myself it depends on the DRM. There are two types of DRM i absolutely hate - the type that requires invisible authentiifcation on each usage or reinstall (even if using steam) as it is a ticking time-bomb that is likely to cause problems in future years (securerom is an example). The other type of DRm I hate is the one that destory performance (some implementations of denuvo has shown this to be a serious issue). I don't really care if there is 'invisible' drm that doesn't interfer with the gaming experience.

They only loose the money from people that have a game on Steam and buy the same game on GOG as well. I have no numbers to back it up, but I think the amount of people who do that is limited.
On the other hand they generate goodwill by offering this and potentially users who stick around to buy more games on GOG.

I prefer great old games much more than I do steam, but yeah downloading can be an issue even these days, and I've still not even tried out the galaxy thing. I wouldn't call them a "niche" company, unless their actual appeal is far less than I surmise it to be.

There's also info from some ex-workers saying the company is in financial trouble. If they are, it will come out soon enough through normal channels, though.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if GOG went under, personally. They seem to have two selling points. One is the "good old games." Most folks looking for that nostalgia have already gotten the games by now, though. There will be some younger enthusiasts that will buy but not anywhere near enough to keep the place going - especially when Steam has a lot of them now, too. The other thing they've got is DRM-free. A few folks are extremely passionate about that but, as we can see from the sales figures, most would rather have all those features Steam has been putting in for the past decade and a half.

All in all, buying on GOG feels like you're paying five star prices for a cheap hotel room. They either need to crank up the features or drop the costs.

Well GOG has already came out on the official website and social media blasting the hit piece Kotaku article that started this. This was taken from the website yesterday.

Quote:

We want to ensure you everything is good with GOG. Being part of a big gaming company, some reports - especially some given by significant media outlets - can often sound much scarier than reality.

I'm not denying sales are down and CD Projeckt exclusives flopped, but insiders say it was only 10% of the company that got fired. This happens in every business.

It's called downsizing to save money.

Damn, it would be a loss for the gaming community if they went under IMHO. Personally, it's the main place I buy my games: if it's on GOG, then I get it there.

Hopefully the rumors are just that: rumors.

I agree, great old games is where I go first and it would be a terrible blow indeed to lose this service. Whatever restructuring they are doing, I hope it all works out for both their benefit and ours as consumers.

That makes no sense.

I'm sure you think so. :)

GOG has only generated $7.8k net profit in 2018
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comme…ir&sh=f25decc0

I honestly thought the company was much more robust than that would indicate. =xxx

$7.800 profit?
Look at the bright side of it - they cannot afford to hire EA's CEO. Which is a positive thing. :)

I think it's interesting to look at GOG's plight. In many ways they have tried to do things right by the consumer, but maybe they needed to be more aggressive to get a bigger market share.

I can imagine Epic getting blame if GOG goes down, but perhaps that's taking the wrong lesson from the situation…

Well gog is only a small portion of the total company. More important you would have to dig into the detail financials as to what was written off this quarter and why. I.e, the profit/loss values can be very misleading because some of the numbers are not tangible. I usually feel that cash-flow is a more useful estimate esp in quarters where large intangibles are written off.

Lol…

Businesses stopped caring about declared profit decades ago. Seriously, unless a business has a specific demand on it to declare a profit then why on earth would they? So the taxman can have most of it?

*lifts up rock* Oh hi, welcome.

Some time ago, on this site, the point was made that GOG was healthy because they were floating recruitment ads.

No fear, no shame. The past does not exist.

An update of a sort…
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl…evenue-decline
-12
+250
That ain't no EA math.

That does also note that the decline is also in revenue, not just in declared profit. I don't think there is any need to worry too much about CDPR itself, and games companies' revenues surely fluctuate with release schedules of major games, but i am a little more concerned that GOG could have the plug pulled if it's not bringing in the coin.