Look at their careers page an see what the very first job listing is for

Head of Software Engineering for GOG Galaxy

Yeah does that sound 'healthy'

That's... not how it works. That's not how anything works.

Okay some GOG employees are keenly aware of the challenges GOG faces in the future. I'm not sure I would include GOG's management in that statement though.

I think GOG should lay off the stupid manager(s) that made those stupid decisions in past two years.

And, the homepage of GOG is still full of bugs, unfixed.

Sure. Why not? Many projects go on without a dedicated employee in that position. That doesn't mean there aren't people managing the project. It doesn't mean there's nobody in that position: the current dedicated employee in that position may also want to do something different (retire, or anything less stressful than herding cats). I spent two years at a company waiting for them to finally hire a replacement for me so I could go ruin my life elsewhere.

Then again, a fast food establishment that closed down a block from where I usually hang out still has has its "now hiring" message even though it's been closed for half a year now. I don't use the "they're hiring" as my sole evidence. I use the fact that they are still releasing games and the statement that their employee count didn't go down, as well.

Reading into the financial statements...not really. The changes were very minor and didn't substantially affect any of the financials.

Two things have primarily hurt GoG's profitability:
1) Lower sales from CDPR's own games as Witcher 3 is on the way out and GWENT was not the easy revenue replacement it was hoped for. Not to mention Thronebreaker. The sudden drop in sales of CDPR's own products hurt.
2) The value of the U.S. dollar which buys about half of GoG's games.

That said, read between the lines of the Kotaku article.
It seems that have hired more than they laid off. They, of course are worried about this new push about the size of developer cuts. And in anticipation are adjusting their focus to presumably more profitable positions.

We'll have to see what the March 21 report will have to say about Q4. I don't trust Kotaku to get the story right anyway and when they seemingly hype the layoffs when the body of the article seemingly says they have hired more than they have laid off, I find it hard to trust Kotaku's judgement of the overall financial situation. Especially since Kotaku didn't even mention last year's publicly released reports. Typical "quality" reporting from that rag...

I wish i could insert a Twin Peaks Gif right here

As much as I look at Kotaku, I hope this is them just taking advantage of the current gaming news trend of layoffs. I appreciate what Kotaku does, but I do not want GOG to crumble from poor press.

Given Jason's push for unions, which the UK arm of a union is partly run by a Kotaku writer, I'm sure this report was purely down to giving the public news. Purely.












;)

Ouch, yah... Galaxy was on a roll with 1.2... then it's been ages since it's seen any real updates... kept waiting for 1.3, but... wow, that's not a good sign if they don't have a head of software engineering :(

Eh. Businesses have their up and down cycles, and over time some positions tend to be made redundant or unnecessary. I'm not particularly worried yet.

Call me when GOG loses half their staff. Until then, no gloom and doom from me.

Exactly! I was lucky that I had 2 games (SOMA and Limbo) on GOG Connect during my ~3 years on GOG— and my Steam library is ridiculously tiny. And because I like GOG so much, I even bought XCOM: Enemy Unknown on GOG again athough I already had it on Steam.

Compare the 2 Connect games I’ve got to the 6 or so free giveaways I got during the same 3 years.

This is just reckless speculation, but I doubt GoG is anywhere near folding. I can think of one thing they would try changing well before that.

Right now, GoG supplements the sales of games within Europe by both paying VAT and offering the "fair price package". If I were to guess, and GoG were forced to become more competitive, I'd expect that at the very least, they might start charging VAT in Europe. They would almost have to if they felt forced to reduce their cut below 30%.

I run a gogrepo batch file almost every day to automatically backup my games and all latest updates. I’m not worried about this particular problem at all. My slow connection always pushed me to backup the games I bought because I can’t download e.g. the 86 GB of Kingdom Come Deliverance “just on a whim” with my 11 Mbit/s connection. And I’m aware that there are quite a lot of people who are even far less lucky with their own connection bandwidth.