At the end of December 2025, Michał Kiciński—one of the original founders of CD PROJEKT and the driving force behind GOG’s launch in 2008—bought back 100% of GOG’s shares for $25m. The platform that pioneered DRM-free distribution now belongs, outright, to the man who started it.
A few weeks after the deal closed, I sat down with GOG’s Managing Director Maciej Gołębiewski and Senior PR Piotr Gnyp to find out what, if anything, actually changed.
What independence actually unlocks
Maciej didn’t oversell it. “The ownership structure is different,” he told me. “Just having one owner—one person—rather than a publicly listed company, a board of directors and all of that.” Day-to-day operations? Same team, same catalog, same mission.
The real shift is at the executive level. There’s no more explaining game preservation strategy to shareholders whose main interest is when the next Witcher ships. Both companies signed a distribution agreement so upcoming CD PROJEKT RED titles still release on GOG, which means Cyberpunk isn’t going anywhere, and neither is your library.
My biggest takeaway is how much this unshackles the mission. Maciej framed it as a change in “risk appetite.” When you’re a subsidiary of a publicly listed studio, preservation isn’t a slam-dunk pitch. Now it’s the main business, not a side quest.
There’s also Retrovibe, Kiciński’s indie publishing label, now in the same family. Maciej hinted at future collaboration without committing to specifics. A DRM-free storefront paired with a label built around reviving classic gaming DNA sounds like a no-brainer to me.
Ownership, rental, and what you’re actually buying
Steam sells you licenses. Game Pass rents you a catalog. Most storefronts are convenient rental agreements dressed up as ownership.
GOG wants to be the exception.
What does real ownership look like to Maciej? Full autonomy to download the game files. No server handshake deciding whether he can launch. No proving who he is. Ownership means the whole artifact—art books, soundtracks, early sketches, dev commentary. The full package.
That’s not the norm in 2026 game development. But it’s a growing one.
How GOG rescues lost games
The process starts with the Dreamlist, a community wishlist where users vote and, more importantly, leave stories explaining why they want a game back. Those stories are what GOG brings to publishers and rights holders when it’s time to make the pitch.
From there it’s legal research, business development, and sometimes actual detective work. “Sometimes companies don’t exist anymore,” Maciej said. “It involves detective work finding who owns the IP.”
The current white whales: Freelancer, Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, Final Fantasy X, and Dragon Quest.
Why DRM is quietly killing gaming history
DRM doesn’t just annoy players—it actively destroys games over time. “Sometimes the game is fine but the DRM solution breaks,” Maciej said.
His ask for developers: even if you ship with Denuvo on day one, keep a clean, vanilla build stored somewhere safe. Because in 20 years, when a museum wants to exhibit your game or a researcher wants to study it, a broken authentication layer makes that impossible. And legally, it gets complicated fast.
Where Stop Killing Games fits in
GOG’s independence landed in the middle of the biggest consumer rights conversation gaming has ever had—and we owe most of that to Ross Scott.
The Stop Killing Games petition cleared 1.45 million confirmed signatures in the EU, well past the one million threshold that forces the European Commission to formally respond by July 27, 2026. Earlier this month, Scott and Josh Strife Hayes presented the campaign at a European Parliament press conference in Brussels, with bipartisan MEP attendance.
The movement kicked off after Ubisoft shut down The Crew, a game players had paid full price for and then simply had switched off. EA followed suit with Anthem in January.
Maciej was honest that GOG hasn’t cracked preservation for always-online titles. But single-player and co-op? That’s where GOG shines.
The business case for giving you what you pay for
The question for GOG hasn’t changed in years: how does a platform that prioritizes ownership over profit survive against Steam’s catalog, Epic’s checkbook, and Microsoft’s Game Pass?
Maciej’s answer: “We need to be super great at everything we do.” Execute well enough that the margins sustain the mission.
What he was more willing to say out loud is that the conversation around ownership is shifting. More people are realizing they’re renting. More of them want to actually own the games they buy.
GOG isn’t trying to be Steam. It’s trying to be the platform where gaming history survives. With a co-founder back in charge, a clearer mandate, and regulators finally paying attention to what “buying a game” actually means, that alternative matters more now than it ever has.
The question isn’t whether GOG can win. It’s whether the rest of the industry is finally ready to play along.
