GOG exclusives 'don't work', store says (Updated)

(Image credit: CD Projekt)

Update: This story initially said Marcin Traczyk was global communications manager for CD Projekt, when he in fact works for GOG.com, which CD Projekt owns. The piece below has been changed to reflect that.

Original story: Role-playing card game Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales was initially a GOG exclusive when it launched last year, but was quickly added to Steam amid disappointing sales. By the sounds of it, it may well be the last time GOG—owned by Thronebreaker developer CD Projekt—experiments with exclusivity.

"It proved to us that exclusives maybe don’t work for us, because we don’t want to limit the number of people who can access the game," GOG.com's global communications manager Marcin Traczyk told PCGamesN at Gamescom this week.

CD Projekt's next game, Cyberpunk 2077, will be available through GOG, Steam and the Epic Games Store, but the studio clearly wants you to buy it through GOG. On Cyberpunk 2077's pre-order page the option to buy from GOG is the most prominent, and buyers are told that "100% of your money goes to the CD Projekt Group". It's clearly working: a third of pre-orders have come through GOG

“We can see that if we have a good offer, and we openly communicate benefits from the users, we might convince them to get the game on our platform, and not on other platforms," Traczyk said.

He added that GOG is in "ongoing" talks to bring Epic Games Store support to GOG Galaxy 2.0, the launcher that wants to unify all your games in one place.

GOG laid off around a dozen employees earlier this year, with one former employee claiming it was "dangerously close to being in the red".

Samuel Horti

Samuel Horti is a long-time freelance writer for PC Gamer based in the UK, who loves RPGs and making long lists of games he'll never have time to play.