GOG - Michal Kicinski Interview

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Gamesindustry talked with the new GOG owner Michal Kicinski:

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The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps

"We see DRM as something which can make the life of a legal customer more difficult," says Michał Kiciński, "so there is no reason to keep it alive."

Just after Christmas, the surprise news emerged that GOG, the DRM-free distribution platform focused on classic games, had been sold by Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt RED (CDPR). The buyer was Michał Kiciński, who co-founded CDPR alongside Marcin Iwiński back in 1994, but who left the firm well over a decade ago.

Originally known as Good Old Games, GOG was launched by CDPR in 2008, and although it still retains its original dedication to distributing older titles, it now also distributes new games - like the controversial Horses from Santa Ragione, which both Steam and the Epic Games Store refused to feature on their storefronts.

But why did CDPR decide to sell GOG? Why did Kiciński buy it? And what does he intend to do with his new purchase? GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Kiciński and GOG's managing director Maciej Gołębiewski to find out some answers.

Gołębiewski confirms that it was CD Projekt that initiated the sale, but adds that it didn't come as a surprise to him. "We have different strategies. GOG has a different strategy, CDPR has their own strategy. So I think at this point it was really natural."

The sale process itself was very competitive, although Kiciński says he still doesn't know who he was bidding against to purchase GOG. "We suspect that there was a company from the United States, but we don't know the name," he says. "Until the very, very end, we were not sure if we would be on the winning side of the process."

Looking at the numbers, GOG has never been a big breadwinner for CDPR. In the first half of 2025, it recorded a net profitability of -0.9%, compared to 35% for the CD Projekt group as a whole. It was a similar story for the 2024 financial year, when GOG recorded net profitability of 0.6%, while the overall group posted profitability of 47.7%.

It's tempting to imagine that these weak figures were the reason why CDPR decided to offload GOG, but Kiciński disagrees. "I think the numbers were not the key point for CDPR to sell GOG," he says. "That would be my speculation. I think that was more a strategic decision, because it's a very common business situation where you have two businesses, and one is much smaller than the other one. And it's very natural that most of the resources go to the parts that generate bigger margins. So in that respect, it was not easy for GOG to be in the one group with CDPR, with their blockbusters and AAA games generating huge profits."

Now that GOG is fully independent, it has a chance to shine. "Right now, GOG can be the boss of its own destiny, and there are no priorities other than being successful on its own."

But what made Kiciński want to purchase GOG? The main reason, he says, is that as the original founder of the company, he thinks it has massive growth potential. "I see opportunities more than negatives, that's my nature, and I see huge opportunities for GOG to grow. And somebody might say that having a competitor like Steam with 80% of the market share is a huge obstacle, but to me it's the opposite. I see: 'Oh, there is one big competitor, it'll be difficult for them to defend the market, because they already have 80%, so it should be easier to take the market from them.'"

But there were emotional reasons behind the investment, too. After all, GOG is his baby. "I still feel attached, even though I [haven't been] here in the campus for the last probably 13 years," says Kiciński, who is talking to us from the GOG boardroom. "It's my first day at work since 2012 actually. I quit CDPR when the Cyberpunk teaser released. That was the last day I was in the office, when the teaser was published on YouTube."

He didn't want to see the company being destroyed through the M&A process, which he notes often doesn't end well for the firm being acquired. "I wanted to avoid the situation where GOG will be swallowed by some very big corporation, and then the user database will be transferred, and the company will be closed down, or the team will be fired. This trend of consolidation is very visible in the gaming industry, and I don't think it's very positive."

But there's also a patriotic element to the purchase. "I think that it's good that GOG is based in Poland," says Kiciński. "It's a Polish company, it's a European company, and it helps to have bigger diversity in the gaming market. We have a very active games development scene... somebody counted more than 600 development teams operating in Poland. And GOG can be a very natural supporter of the efforts of those development teams."

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