GOG’s New (Old) Boss Reaffirms Anti-DRM Commitment, Even If It Costs Sales

At the very end of 2025, Witcher 3 developer CD Projekt Red announced it had sold its long-running PC gaming store GOG to CD Projekt and GOG co-founder Michał Kiciński. And while Kiciński launched GOG with its anti-DRM ethos, he’s been away from both companies for the last 13 years, and it was unknown if he might take the now independent storefront in a new direction. According to an interview with GI.biz, there are no fears of GOG backing down from its bold stance, even if it means missing out on lucrative AAA gaming sales.

Then known as Good Old Games, the store was originally launched by Polish developer CDPR in 2008, with a focus on selling classic games that had become hard to get hold of, stripped free of old, decaying digital rights management software. As the store developed, it began selling newer games too, but always on the condition that they shipped without any form of DRM.

In the late 2000s, DRM had become the cause of a huge amount of controversy, with games shipping on DVD-ROM with ludicrous, game-breaking restrictions, such as limits on how many times they could be installed, the inability to run fully installed games without the discs in drives, and most insidiously, online checks that meant games couldn’t be played without an active internet connection. Ostensibly in place to prevent the illusory threat of “piracy,” these restrictions only ever prevented legitimate game owners from playing their games freely, while pirated versions were usually stripped of all DRM by the first day of a game’s release. It was a farce. (And it still is, with DRM software in digital games now severely impeding performance.) GOG has been run for the last 18 years with a refusal to sell DRM-infected games.

It’s good to know that time hasn’t changed Michał Kiciński’s position on the matter. Speaking to GI.biz, the new outright owner of GOG explained that after a bidding process against an unknown rival company, he succeeded in buying the company he created because he sees “opportunities” for the business. GOG made very little money for CDPR, but Kiciński believes there’s a route to more financial success, and he’s not exactly unambitious.

“I see huge opportunities for GOG to grow,” Kiciński says. “And somebody might say that having a competitor like Steam with 80 percent 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 percent, so it should be easier to take the market from them.”

The focus to try to do this is not to try to out-Steam Steam, but rather to “just be better at a certain segment.” This is the site’s focus on classic games, but also working with independent developers with big-game games who are willing to sell via GOG. Citing games like Clair Obscur and Hollow Knight: Silksong, which were simultaneously released on GOG alongside Steam, it proves that outside of the mega-publishers, there are those willing to embrace GOG’s ethos. Oh, and as part of the sale it was agreed that CDPR’s games will remain on GOG for at least the next six years—that certainly helps.

When it comes to refusing DRM, Kiciński tells GI.biz that it remains “a core value of GOG, and there’s no signs that it might die in any visible future,” describing this as both an ethical and pragmatic choice. And, with a refreshing frankness, he says he has no time for publishers who don’t get it. “Most corporate people, they make plain stupid decisions.”

You can read the rest of the interview, along with details over whey the company was sold and its plans for the future, over on GI.biz.