I've been saying this for maybe a decade now already, but, as an independent company, with the amount of money it makes (or rather, doesn't) GOG probably would've gotten shut down ages ago.

The only thing keeping GOG afloat is the fact that the owners have their own BIG IP's where they can save a serious cut of the sales by selling through the GOG store. If it wasn't for those GOG probably would've been a distant memory already.

I still laugh every time I see the Steam forums get flooded with all these Denuvo haters complaining about it because DRM BAD, and pretending it's all about DRM and preservation instead of it preventing piracy, and then I look at the state GOG is in. Disingenuous bull. If that many people actually cared about DRM GOG would be in a much better place.

Fact is, most people just don't care (enough). Convenience, savings, social features or gamified store meta are more likely to sway people's opinions than DRM that affects people maybe once in a blue moon and even then they only care till the issue is solved.

Perhaps, but you are preaching to the wrong people, because most of us who are here, and have been here for a while, do certainly care quite a lot about (the lack of) DRM.

The fact that GOG isn't making enough money (vs what they are burning) is a consequence of some bad decision making on their end IMHO. Instead of focusing on offline installers and staying in a DRM-free niche, they felt the need to become part of the gaming client crowd and trade blows with Steam and/or EGS, becoming the better alternative. That's simply never going to happen.

Fun comparison btw, since EGS is much much more of a massive money sink-hole and could definitely not have kept going without a huge inflow lifeline from Epic.

EGS is payed only by Fortnite and this year Epic got another 1.5 billion from Disney.
The UE5 margin is said to be not that high, but for paying even less for the engine you can go for Epic (time) exclusive.
In fact, not only EGS will rise and fall with Fortnite, whole current Epic Games will. Very likely UE5 is not able to keep current Epic Games (minus Fortnite Dev Part) alive on its own, even less with current pricing model - that is kinda build for dragging games to EGS though.

In the end, EGS is a vanity project that started out as loose money to become as big as steam to attack steam - and years later it still is...

GoG is a vanity project on its own, but in a different way. Because the heads of the parent company do care about the old games and the none DRM stuff (and they still do). For sure they would like to see GoG being bigger, but as long as it does not loose them tons of money, they go with it.
That is the small difference, that GoG is kinda self sustaining most of the time and does not need infusions in the billions from other sources.
Or better said, it doesn't get those - that it could "need" those is another topic.

But as EGS shows, even burning through shitloads of money can't make you the biggest fish.
It is even very likely, that EGS would implode if it would have to stand on its own feets. They cut down in exclusives and giveaways a bit, but only a bit.
At last for GoG most people who got a game here have used money to get it. Epic on the other hand has a huge problem of turning "customers" into people who actually payed money.

It could help if GOG had the same library as Steam, but most developers don't want to give up their DRMs. Sometimes there isn't anything GOG can do about it. Maybe someday, but that's neither here or there.

Sure, but having a client like Galaxy doesn't address that problem at all, only increases the maintenance costs. You could argue there are some people who want DRM-free content AND a modern delivery platform that auto-updates, has achievements and so on, but IMHO these two user requirements don't overlap all that much.

In any case, it is what it is, the milk won't go back in the jar now.

i wont go back to steam

I mean it would be nice if you could get past versions of games on GoG.

I doubt they have the harddisk space though.

Curiously, you can roll back to a previous version on galaxy and make your own rar to keep in most cases, so the versions are here. Why they do not implement this with the offline installers is another gog mystery.

I just thought if the two platforms had the same library, people could go to GOG instead of Steam for their games, and GOG could make enough money from that for maintenance. Though, that was very wishful thinking on my part. Thank you for clearing this up.