What's next for GOG? Publishing games, maybe, but its new owner isn't in any rush

Right at the end of last year, Cyberpunk and Witcher developer CD Projekt Red sold off its game distribution company to its original co-founder, Michał Kiciński (who is also the co-founder of CD Projekt itself, so, go figure). With this sort of new owner, the plan is generally to stick to what it knows best, i.e. sprucing up old games and making sure any game on the platform is DRM-free. But in a new interview, Kiciński also shared his interest in the platform doing some publishing.

Kiciński shared as such with Eurogamer, explaining that he is also “co-owner of an indie game publishing company called Retrovibe. So one of the directions which were not that much possible in the past is evolving GOG more into publishing business, and that’s something we will certainly discuss.” One thing he did stress is that a formal decision on such a thing hasn’t been made yet, but “this opens a whole new area of activities for GOG which was not that much possible together with CD Projekt Red as one group, because at CD Projekt Red, all publishing activities were connected with their own games, and they didn’t want to spread attention into some other topics.”

It’s worth noting that such a future is far off, as Kiciński only technically officially started his role as sole head of the company on January 8th, noting that the current priority is that GOG improves on what it currently does. “We also discussed that there is no need for any pivots or changes in philosophy or something like that,” he said. “GOG has a very special place on the market, very unique values, very loyal customers, and we appreciate that, and we want to build up on that, not changing too much.”

I am not personally sure that this feels like a good way forward. I can envision a world where a game GOG publishes gets priority treatment on the homepage over one that doesn’t and that is an icky future if you ask me. Luckily, as Kiciński says, no decisions have been made, so hopefully a lot of thought gets put into this first.