joelandsonja: With the success of 8bitdo's SN30 Pro + Controller, I couldn't help thinking that GOG should get in on the controller market. Why not do a collaboration with a company like Logitech and create a custom GOG.com controller? I realize that a few other companies (such as Steam) have done this before, but there are very few controllers on the PC market that actually get it right. GOG has the potential to create a fantastic classic style gaming controller that's full customizable, just like the SN30 Pro, which has the potential to satisfy the needs of PC gamers everywhere. You could even offer custom buttons and faceplates in classic PC styles like Commodore, IBM or Tandy. As it stands, 8bitdo are the only real competitors on the market, because Logitech hasn't updated their controllers in over a decade, and Steelseries suffers from overall poor design and quality. It's something worth considering.
GOG is a relatively small company compared to Valve or others overall. Valve has a lot of bank and padding to be able to spend money on various speculative projects including hardware. I would say however that GOG very much does not. GOG is a growing subsidiary of CDP SA for years now and in that regard they're successfully growing their store and number of games offered, features etc. but they don't have a massive pile of cash sitting around to throw into various random speculative investments such as computer hardware by any long shot.
The parent company is publicly traded and their financial information is thus available in the investor portion of the website. From there anyone can see GOG's financial performance under the parent company, etc. In the last year or so they've been getting a significant portion of their income from the Gwent game's in game purchases and it appears that without that the store would be operating at a loss if memory serves correct. Sales of non-CDPR games just do not appear to be bringing in signficant revenue in 2019. Fortunately they do have Gwent but If I recall reading correctly, the revenue from Gwent underperformed estimates as well sadly. They also laid off a dozen or so employees earlier this year during a restructure of sorts.
What does this mean? It means that they are working hard on Galaxy and on improving the store to maintain the existing business as a DRM-free game storefront and they do not have millions of dollars to experiment with game controllers or other random things. They need to put every cent they have into improving what they already have and making sure that it can produce positive cashflow quarter after quarter.
Fortunately Cyberpunk 2077 isn't far off from release and they've already stated about a third of all pre-order sales have been directly on GOG, so that's promising for both GOG and CDPR, and 2020 is likely to be a fantastic year for both subsidiaries.
What they do need to do to keep their momentum going is to stay focused like a laser beam on doing what they already know how to do and doing it better and better, while innovating their platform to draw more people to it and more publishers. Every thing they spend money and other resources on that is not improving their gaming store and client and back end infrastructure etc. in this highly competitive gaming market with new stores cropping up every 6 months or so, is one more thing distracting them from their core competency.
Scattering their focus speculatively on things such as hardware or other random endeavours would likely spell disaster, and as such I would say it is highly unlikely we'll see anything like that happen any time soon if ever.
