I'm content knowing they're foing ok and according to today's cast, they seem to be doing more than ok. Why would we need specifics?

Who said "need?"

I am not in any way GOG staff but part of the answer is simply that GOG is doing very well and has been profitable from the beginning. They keep saying this on almost every interview and every conference.

How much profitable? Well, come on. That must be partly a business secret. Even as a community we do not have a right to know all financial details. Does Gabe Newell tell Steam's yearly earnings to the world? No - it's a private information. Do major game companies publish game sales figures for each of their games? No, only when they see fit, when they can use it as advertisment and never exact numbers, because then competitors gain knowledge and this would be an advantage in the competition.

However, a little searching in the Internet about GOG.com would have brought you the information that they together with CDP are part of the Optimus S.A. company which is publicly traded on the stock market in Warsaw/Poland. As you know, such companies must fullfill higher standards of openness about their financial development as private companies. So, like EA, Activision, Take 2 but unlike Steamworks which is private, they publish quarterly and yearly reports. Being a polish company traded on the polish stock market, these reports are in polish, but google translate can help you translating them from their website which is easy to find. Keep checking these reports for information about future development. Finally, looking at the stock price development and market capitalization you see that GOG+CDP is worth millions, much less than one of the big publishers, but already not small-sized anymore and gaining momentum.

There you would see that GOG+CDP makes profit and is growing but has had huge investments in the last year (due to development of TW2). These investments now must prove profitable to facilitate further growth. Also a risk of the business model of GOG might be a lack of new games (with the announced new publishers I would think this is unlikely) or increased piracy on GOG games or legal problems (you never know about these things). On the other side, the business model of GOG scales very favorably with number of customers, meaning when number of sales increase by 163%, the profit will surely increase by a larger factor (you know: fixed costs versus turnover related costs, which are quite low here).

So, as a potential investor and community member you can get the normal amount of information to decide whether to invest or not in GOG+CDP. Maybe they will decide to publish more numbers, but I guess they won't - after all the competitors aren't too.

Well, if you watched the press conference yesterday, they did do that (163% sales increase, nice chart showing near consistent growth, etc.).

Not really. The graphs only showed the sales (i.e. income), but we have no idea about the cost side. In particular - we don't know what types of deals GOG makes with the publishers. Do they get some percentage of sales? Or is it a fixed-price contract? Or a combination of both ("Pay us 10 mil now, and 50% of each game sold"). Of course, we will never know such details, as they are result of long and painful negotiations...
One thing I know for sure - getting LucasArts onboard ain't cheap!

Anyway - it would be good to know if you guys are profitable, or should we start making local backups of purchased games NOW :-D

Some nice information that GOG displays is a ranking of best selling games (directly on the start page right below) also for each genre. I used this as a recommendation for myself. I love to see what's popular among other people. I only wonder what the related time frames are (best seller in the last XX days)?

Actually, we kind of do know that GOG takes a percentage of the sales while the rest goes to the rights holder (I wan't to say it was something like 20 or 30% to GOG, the rest to the rights holder, minus transaction fees), they have told us as much in the past. Given that, all we really need to know is sales growth and trends and we have a really good idea of how well they are doing. Considering that they are experiencing 163% growth over last year, I think it is fairly safe to say that GOG is profitable and doing just fine... but you should still back up your stuff; it's stupid not to, regardless of how GOG is doing.

But they did say that at the conference. They gave growth percentages and pretty much revealed which publishers they were trying to get on the fold and even admitted three of those would be in this very year. That sounds like "Yes we're doing well and we're trying to expand" even if they don't use those very words.

The main page has a video of the conference just in case you missed it or wish to check it again.

edit: Crap. I saw this post at the end of page one and thought it was the last, so I've been ninja'd quite a few times.

Have you ever actually gotten back a reply from someone in marketing from any company anywhere ever? You've just copied and pasted their template.

In fact, EnigmaticT - looks like you just got a new boilerplate ^_^

It's great that you steadily get new customers but I'm curious to know how many keep buying games?

They know because the sales keep increasing. Seriously did you look at that spike on the graph? It looks like the shutdown stunt was massively effective and sales have only kept increasing since then.

Some of that spike had less to do with the shutdown and more to do with the arrival of the Atari/Hasbro D&D games.