– Managing director Piotr Karwowski comments on GOG’s growth
Eurogamer has published a chat with GOG’s managing director Piotr Karwowski and global communications head Åukasz Kukawski to chart GOG’s growth and evolution across its near decade of operation.
The full interview offers a look at GOG’s DRM-free policies and potential future as a mod-friendly platform, but one specific point that devs may be interested in is how the platform’s leadership views it compared to the digital distribution giant Steam.
On the big day-one releases, he says GOG typically sees about 15 percent the sales that Steam does. Despite the unavoidable comparisons between the two platforms, Karwowski says that it hasn’t been GOG’s goal to try and take down Steam or go head-to-head with it. He says that GOG instead aims to create a more curated, uncrowded space for games and offer enough customer-friendly features to keep purchasers building up their libraries on GOG.
“Whenever someone says ‘how do you see yourself against Steam – how do you compete?’… I know we are in the same space of digital distribution, selling the same product, but we never ever say, ‘OK this is what Steam’s doing so let’s kill Steam this way,’” says Karwowski. “The assumption of building a product around being a killer of some other product is extremely stupid. Why not build a service which has value and brings something more to the consumer rather than just trying to say we’re up against those guys and want to take part of it.”