The_Puppet94: Now I am interested in some evidence for number manipulation.
Zrevnur: Unfortunately I havent read the related thread (yet?) so I dont want to write much about it:
In general 2020 was Corona year. Gaming probably benefited from that. So it is to be expected that GOG also benefited from this.
Looking at the first page with numbers - the "Audience growth" page. Far as I understand the wording it uses "monthly activity" of Dec-2020 vs Dec-2019. Now we already know that there was a special event (Cyberpunk release) in Dec-2020. So instead of trying to statistically remove this special event (like its usually done for proper financial reporting) their numbers specifically target exactly this special event by making it a "monthly" comparison. If they would honorably give numbers they could have made a year-minus-Cyberpunk-phase vs year-minus-Cyberpunk-phase comparison which would mostly remove the Cypberpunk special effect.
On the same page the "new user registrations" isnt properly clear what it means so its hard to say much about it. Does that include spammers and bots for example? Its also a relative number which isnt very useful if we dont know what it relates to.
Edit: Changed 'December' to 'Cyberpunk-phase' to consider preorders
We can agree that 2020, was a special year for gaming due to corona, and for GOG probably because of Cyberpunk2077. I don't know any numbers showing how many people jumped the GOG wagon because of Cyberounk and bought it here "to support CDPR" instead of buying it somewhere else (where they usually buy there games).
IMO this "buy CP2077 at GOG to support CDPR" was a big marketing stunt, as almost everything related to that game, and for some reason I doubt it was that successful and made that many people consider GOG instead of another platform (when they usually buy there and not at GOG). But I don't know real numbers so it's just my thoughts on that.
A bigger number increase in 2020 (due to corna) on any gaming platform is no surprise for me and not really a number manipulation, when the whole year you try to cover with your statistic is a outlier well than it is what it is. I wouldn't expect a similar growth next year and I definatly wouldn't be surprised if overall gamer numbers go down again 2021/22 when the pandemic is under control.
patrikc: My accountant also came up with some numbers and he was wrong. Not by that much, but still wrong. He got an earful from his boss. So you see, anyone can play around with numbers, not everyone will come up with the real numbers.
Never trust any statistic you haven't faked yourself.
