GOG announces Patreon-like $5 membership to support PC games preservation

GOG has introduced Patrons, a new $5 monthly subscription that helps fund games preservation.

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CD Projekt Group's GOG storefront has announced its own Patreon-like support system that allows gamers to directly contribute to helping permanently secure classic PC games. GOG Patrons is a subscription where users pay $5 a month to help boost the budget to preserve more old-school digital games.

So...why charge money? Doesn't CD Projekt already make a ton of money? While the publisher does make hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year, GOG is an ancillary, loss-leading part of the business. GOG, which stands for Good Old Games, will buy the rights to original versions of legacy PC games to resell on their storefront.

Buying licenses is costly, and GOG is not a very profitable business. Usually, the store doesn't make much profit, if any at all. For the first 9 months of 2025, the GOG store made 910,000 PLN, or about $253,000, on the back of 143 million PLN ($39 million) in revenue. The costs to run GOG are high, and while it's true the store does sell modern games, there's a number of associated costs with keeping licenses for the games, IPs, and franchises--many of which CD Projekt doesn't actually own outright.

Despite this performance, GOG says that it is "doing well," and that the new paid support system wasn't made to help bail the group out of financial dire straits. That being said, the above point about how GOG basically operates at or near a loss still stands.

"GOG Patrons isn't a lifeline. It's a way to go further, faster. Preservation takes time, resources, and people. And while we've always found a way, we know we can do even more: with your support."

GOG is careful to say that this is not an actual content subscription service--you are basically paying to support the initiative, not unlike Patreon. Users can cancel at any time.

Interested users can sign up to GOG Patrons here, or check below for more info:

The GOG Preservation Program is our ongoing effort to save classic games from being lost to time. That means working to secure rights, fixing compatibility so they run hassle-free on modern systems, and even rebuilding missing features so the experience is the best you can get, while staying true to the original.

When you become a Patron, your contribution goes directly into supporting GOG's work. It helps us cover our daily operations and things like licensing old titles, hiring engineers to make them playable again, and building tools that keep them alive for the long term.

GOG Patrons exists only for those who want to help us restore, maintain, and support more classic PC games through the GOG Preservation Program.

What Patrons receive as a thank-you for their active support:

• Access to Patron-only Discord server with exclusive video content.
• Their nickname credited on the GOG Preservation Program game pages.
• A special badge for their GOG profile.