Is GOG Worth It for Indie Developers?

GOG is curated — you pitch, they accept or pass — and its DRM-free, ownership-minded audience skews toward RPGs, strategy, retro, and single-player games. For a fitting game it adds a meaningful single-digit-to-teens percentage on top of Steam revenue with modest porting effort; for ill-fitting genres the application isn't worth the wait. That's the short version — the sections below get into the how, the why, and the mistakes worth dodging.

A curated store with a specific soul

GOG built its identity on DRM-free ownership and good citizenship: offline installers, no client requirement, curation over flood. Its buyers are loyal to that ethos and to certain genres — deep single-player experiences, CRPGs, strategy, classic-adjacent design. Multiplayer-dependent and live-service games fit poorly by construction.

Acceptance isn't guaranteed even for good games; rejections without detailed reasons are common, and devs routinely reapply after Steam traction changes the conversation.

What the revenue actually looks like

Public dev post-mortems consistently place GOG at a single-digit to mid-teens percentage of Steam revenue for accepted indie titles — real money for a small port, not a Steam replacement. The store runs frequent sales and its audience responds to them; participation in GOG's promotional events is where most of the revenue concentrates.

The split is comparable to Steam's, and GOG handles regional pricing and taxes similarly. The work is mostly build packaging (their Galaxy features are optional) and page upkeep.

DRM-free is a commitment, not a checkbox

Shipping on GOG means every update ships as a downloadable, offline-installable build — and your game must be fully playable without phoning home. If your stack assumes Steam APIs for saves, achievements, or unlocks, you'll abstract those first; that abstraction is the actual port.

The upside is reputational as much as financial: GOG presence signals player-respecting values to an audience that notices, reviews kindly, and refunds rarely.

Protect the downside first

Indie game revenue is lumpy and unpredictable, and most advice quietly assumes a hit. Plan for the median outcome instead: a launch that earns modestly and grows slowly. Keep fixed costs low, keep some runway, and make deals you could live with if the game sells a tenth of your hopes.

None of this is pessimism — it's what lets you take real creative risks. A developer who can afford to miss is a developer who can afford to be interesting.

Get unglamorous things in writing

Splits, deadlines, deliverables, who owns what if the project dies — the awkward conversations are dramatically cheaper before money shows up. A one-page agreement between friends feels like overkill right up until it's the only thing that saves the friendship.

You rarely need a lawyer for a first project, but you do need clarity. Write down what was agreed, date it, and make sure everyone has a copy. Future-you will be grateful.

The quiet work that protects all of this

Everything in this post gets undone by an unstable build. A great store page, a clever marketing beat, a perfect jam entry — none of it survives 'crashed twice, refunded'. Stability isn't a feature players praise, but it's the floor everything else stands on.

Give yourself visibility before you need it: crash reports with stack traces, a simple way for players to flag issues from inside the game, and a habit of fixing the top recurring error before adding anything new.

Putting it to work

Don't try to act on all of this at once. Pick the one change that costs you the least and pays the most this week, do it, and see what actually happens before reaching for the next.

Most of this rewards steadiness over intensity. A small improvement made every week, checked against how real players respond, outruns any single burst of effort — in this corner of game development and every other one.

Make the guesses cheap, the agreements written, and the runway longer than the plan.