GOG is hosting its first digital showcase on November 5

PC digital storefront GOG has scheduled its first-ever GOG Showcase for Thursday, November 5, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET (10:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM CET). Announced on November 4 to coincide with the company's 18th anniversary, the broadcast will stream on YouTube with subtitles in English, German, French, and Polish, promising new games, store features, and details on the platform entering a "new chapter."

For the past 18 years, GOG has skipped the Nintendo Direct and State of Play broadcast trend, relying instead on store sales and blog posts to announce catalog additions. Hosting a standalone presentation is a first for the company, and I love GOG and think they are making all the right moves lately.

90.7 million zloty and no corporate parent

That promised "new chapter" follows a busy ten months of restructuring. Originally launched in 2008 as Good Old Games by CD Projekt co-founders Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński, the storefront spent 17 years as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Warsaw-based publisher while building a catalog of more than 11,200 DRM-free titles.

In December 2025, CD Projekt sold 100 percent of GOG's shares directly to Kiciński for 90.7 million Polish zloty (about $25.2 million) so the parent company could focus on its own RPG development roadmap. Under the buyout terms, GOG operates as an independent company while keeping its distribution agreement for The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 franchises. Since going independent, the store has moved quickly. Just last week, on October 29, it teamed up with Polish indie publisher Retrovibe (which Kiciński also co-founded) to launch Retrovibe by GOG, a publishing label with five upcoming PC and console releases already in the pipeline, including retro shooters Cop Bastard and Project Warlock: Lost Chapters.

The company has also been laying the groundwork for long-requested store updates that could show up during Thursday's broadcast. In July 2026, joint CEO Krzysztof Papliński confirmed that GOG had hired a specialist to build a native Linux version of the optional GOG Galaxy client, which has historically been restricted to Windows and macOS.

304 games and printable cardboard

GOG's biggest wins over the past two years have come from its formal preservation efforts. Launched in November 2024 with 100 titles, the GOG Preservation Program commits internal engineering resources to keep classic PC games running on modern operating systems through custom DirectX wrappers, rebuilt installers, and stability patches, even after the original developers stop supporting them.

By February 2026, the program had applied 1,461 fixes across 267 games, rescuing long-unavailable releases like Dino Crisis 1 and 2, Breath of Fire IV, and Cold Fear alongside fan-voted additions from the GOG Dreamlist. In September, the program expanded to 304 games and partnered with Big Box Collection to bundle downloadable 3D scans and printable papercraft box art for classics like Myst, Descent, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. That work earned GOG the Research Data Alliance Award at the Digital Preservation Awards in Warsaw on October 15.

The company has even floated the idea of selling physical PC games again. Senior business development manager Marcin Paczynski noted in an interview earlier this week that his ideal scenario would let customers click a game on their digital GOG shelf and order a physical boxed copy for home delivery, though warehouse logistics and publisher licensing approvals remain major hurdles. I'm curious whether Thursday's stream will stick to software and Linux updates or actually put a timeline on those physical boxes, because an independent storefront doubling down on offline installers and classic game rescues is a welcome sight when the rest of the industry is sprinting toward locked-down digital ecosystems.