[larsiusprime]

Article's author here.

GOG.com got started in 2008, which was critical to their success. Steam had much lower market share back then. If GOG started today I would give them much, much, lower odds of succeeding.

And consider also that Desura, Direct2Drive, Impulse, etc, which also were around in that rough time period, are all dead and gone.

[Chathamization]

GOG only started selling newer games in 2012, and even then it started only selling a few. Before that, it was a place to buy old games (hence the original name, Good Old Games). I think GOG's success was because for its first few years, it was selling games that simply weren't available on Steam or anywhere else at the time. When it did finally go up against Steam, it already had a decently large customer base, and was able to set itself up well a a DRM-free Steam alternative.

[masklinn]

Indeed. First they got a market which was unserved (old games), then they got the CD Project Red games (Witcher series), then they branched into third-party games.

[larsiusprime]

I agree with all of this!

[gnoupi]

Also, let's not forget another point, is that CD Projekt was already a large distributor/localizer in Poland long before they had their RED division: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt

So they didn't really start out of nothing when it comes to having connections with game developers.