GOG is breaking off from CD PROJEKT with 100% of it now owned by one of the original co-founders, Michał Kiciński, who is a co-founder of both GOG and CD PROJEKT.
With this move, GOG will continue operating independently but there’s an agreement that’s been signed between CD PROJEKT and GOG for future cooperation including releasing games on GOG from CD PROJEKT RED. The purchase of GOG came at a cost of PLN 90.7 million and Kiciński continues holding their shares in CD PROJEKT too as co-founder but now owns 100% of the shares in GOG.
I’m not an expert by any means and find this a little confusing too. The three possibilities seem like:
The business needed a cash influx and because CD Projekt and Michał Kiciński still seem to believe in GOG’s mission, “purchasing it” was a way of injecting money while setting a ceiling on risk for CD Projekt versus simply keeping it on the balance sheet and spending more on it.
They truly think that separate businesses will operate more efficiently and that the missions weren’t aligned enough to be in the same org structure. This seems possible but no way to really know.
They want to make GOG more appealing to developers who may not trust it if it’s tied so closely to CD Projekt. This seems unlikely, since Epic, Valve, etc all have self-published games by the platform owners on their storefronts.
Or some combination of the three… The timing seems to be to do it by end of calendar year to make a clean break on the books, at least.
Could also be a case of Michał Kiciński truly believing in the mission statement of GOG and wanting to free the organisation of any shareholders to be beholden to so that GOG can operate at near-breakeven if need be instead of having to maximise profits to please shareholders.
This is of course giving him a massive benefit of the doubt, but I guess I still have a sliver of hope for humanity somewhere in my rotten applecore of a heart.
Definitely feels like both 1 & 2.