Comment by araes
18 hours ago
Cost of Sales is eating them alive.
They lose ~72% of every PLN/EUR/USD they bring in. Their financial statement is Really confusingly laid out. However, pg 36 has comparison. GOG is actually not THAT tiny of a segment (percentage-wise, absolute EUR / PLN numbers are still small). 49k PLN / 300k PLN for the CD PROJEKT Red and 350k total.
Compared to CD PROJEKT RED, insanely horrible cost of sales ratio.
July 1st, 2025 to Sept. 30th, 2025 (Numbers are in PLN, directly from document)
CD PROJEKT RED GOG.COM
Sales revenue 303,133 48,982
Cost of sales 23,310 35,151
January 1st, 2025 to Sept. 30th, 2025 (Numbers are in PLN, directly from document)
CD PROJEKT RED GOG.COM
Sales revenue 658,575 143,285
Cost of sales 61,307 103,075
PLN numbers can be verified (GOG quarterly is really on the order of 10,000 EUR) by looking at pages 30-31 with export sales summaries.
For comparison to the 72% ratio, their main video game creation business spends 7-8% on cost of sales.
From page 8 "Selling expenses represents costs of marketing activities relating to the GOG.COM platform and the work on the development and processing of sales executed through that platform."
From some of the rest of the document, it seems like "maybe" some of that is prepayments and costs related to providing the software.
Personal view, while it may be beneficial to not have to deal with GOG from an operational perspective, a significant percentage of sales are on the platform for their own software, and CD PROJEKT's title releases heavily influence sales figures on GOG, so it may end up limiting themselves from an otherwise beneficial distribution channel. Probably provides better negotiating position also if you're trying to barter with Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Valve, ect... However, if the partnership continues with the next owners, may not be an issue.
Does Cost of sales include game developers cut? because that 143/103 fits their 30-70 split.
Suspicion is you're correct, and is it's probably something like payments or money to developers who have games on the GOG platform. However, the definition in the document is kind of self referential.
"Cost of Sales" is 100% "Cost of goods for resale and materials sold"
and "The Cost of goods for resale and materials sold represents mainly the cost of sales of goods for resale and materials sold via the GOG.COM platform"
Kind of self referential. Everything else is in the CD PROJEKT RED group (Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges).
If your suspicion is correct then that would also imply that historical games are either almost always the same 70/30, or GOG is not really making that much on "historical" games (ie, most of the money is recent indie releases). And, kind of implied that they're not really selling that much. At maybe 10 EUR average, that's only like 1000 games a quarter.
Notably, its really difficult to find anything other than an online article that actually talks about the 70/30 split situation. Google links to Wikipedia for evidence that then links to a 2013 Engadget article. Nothing appears to actually spell out the financial terms on GOG's actual site.
If you happen to know where that type of legalese is on the GOG site, that would actually a helpful ref.
all the numbers are in thousand units. So more like 1M games a quarter.