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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

It was pretty clear that once they’ll become more and more popular things would have to change.

Especially since as you grow you get into a weird point where you can start losing a lot of money for swallowing these refunds but you don’t have enough weight to force publishers to share the costs like Steam does.

Also since GoG has no DRM and no user activity monitoring almost no publisher would agree to participate in refunds.

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I wonder if a type of 'restocking' fee can be applied to games.

It happens where you get a game try it and it doesn't work on your hardware or it just wasn't what you expected.

I'd gladly pay a 10-20% restocking fee for whatever process they need to do to recycle that key and issue a refund rather than be stuck with a game that will never be played again in my library.

After playing a game more than 2 hours good luck getting a refund on steam, and good luck finding out how much you really enjoy a game in 2 hours.

30 days seems a bit extreme and I do see it ripe for abuse.

It cannot be applied even for physical products in the EU lawfully. At least for normal refunds.

For extended ones, sure, why not.

I love GOG but unfortunately popularity does not translate to profitability. GOG had reported ~8000 USD profit for 2018.

I wish I'm proved wrong but I doubt this move is going to help the situation.

What exactly is the issue, operational costs are too high for the current user base?

Note that GOG is owned by CD Projekt, the studio behind The Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077. So while they may not make much on GOG itself, they make a lot more money selling their games there then on other platforms like Steam.

Actually in the past GOG brought them more money than their own games, so the fact that it's not profitable isn't good.

Maybe that was true in the past, but CD Projekt Red made $28 million profit compared to GOG's $8000 in 2018. The company as a whole is not exactly in financial peril even if GOG is barely breaking even.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/65367/gog-com-barely-making-p...

That TW3 is profitable is good, but the store itself shouldn't be struggling, unless something is wrong.

I'd be interested to know how much margin they reclaim by owning their own distribution channel. Presumably Steam takes a huge commission, so if GOG is profitable (even if only by $8000), then it costs them nothing to run, so that additional margin might add up to a significant amount.

How much profit should they report? Millions? Aren't they viable already?

8000? Is that a typo?

How about revenue? I don't think they should be judged on profit but on market capture. CDPR has > 250 P/E ratio. I'm thinking about shorting them but maybe they could use this money to compete with Steam and Blizzard (MMO). That's only way to justify such investment IMO (not an expert).

GOG is CDP product and I don't know how it relates to CDPR(game studio).

They have "removed a requirement" for refunding your game, making it more liberal, and you're telling us that this is a change for the worse, that clearly had to happen?

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