GOG Wants to Sell Physical PC Games Again — Publishers May Decide

GOG, the DRM-free PC game storefront, is exploring a return to physical game sales — a business it has never operated, and one that requires publisher approvals it does not currently hold. Marcin Paczynski, the company's business development and partnerships manager, laid out the idea in an interview with GamesRadar+, describing a mail-order model built directly into GOG's digital shelf.

His words were unusually concrete for an unreleased service. "Ideally, my dream would be to be able to buy physical versions of those games on GOG," Paczynski said. "You go to your shelf on GOG, you click on the game that you would like to receive a physical copy of, you order it, and it gets to you. That would be a perfect scenario."

A dream is the operative word. GOG has never held physical inventory, managed shipping, or handled the returns and warehousing problems that come with atoms rather than bits. Paczynski acknowledged the complication openly. He also confirmed that GOG would need what he called "additional approvals" from publishers before it could store and sell physical copies of their titles. That is the commercial crux: the storefront owns the customer relationship, but the publishers own the right to say no.

Why now?

The timing is not accidental. The PC was effectively the first platform to abandon physical games, and the console market is now following. Sony and Microsoft have recently floated unpopular plans to stop producing physical games for their consoles, which removes the last mass-market justification for disc manufacturing at scale. Into that gap, GOG sees an opportunity to sell ownership itself.

The company already runs the GOG Preservation Program, an effort to keep old games playable on modern hardware. Physical media would extend the same argument — that a buyer should control the copy — into the real world. Paczynski framed the project as giving gamers more consumer freedom through tangible products, and he suggested physical copies could even revive a used market, where players swap, buy, and sell games among themselves. Publishers have historically hated that idea. It will be interesting to see how many sign the "additional approvals."

What would the media actually be?

No format has been decided. Paczynski offered no details on delivery, and the obvious candidates are problematic. Optical disc drives are now rare on new PCs, which makes CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays an awkward fit for a platform that ditched them first.

The plausible alternatives are media most PCs can still read:

• USB flash drives
• SD cards, potentially packaged in the style of Nintendo Switch cartridges

Either format would also give publishers a vehicle for exclusive physical extras — stickers, maps, secrets, lore, and other collectibles of the sort that once accompanied boxed PC releases. That material culture, the tactile ritual of opening a new game and its bundled trinkets, is part of what GOG hopes to resurrect.

What stands in the way

Three obstacles are visible from the interview alone. First, logistics: inventory, shipping, and warehousing are new disciplines for a purely digital retailer. Second, legal and contractual work: every physical SKU would need publisher sign-off beyond existing digital distribution agreements. Third, format: without an optical standard, GOG must pick a medium that works across modern PCs without alienating owners of older machines.

None of this is insurmountable, and none of it is scheduled. Paczynski offered no timeline, no pricing, and no publisher commitments — only a personal wish and a corporate exploration. For a storefront whose entire brand is permanent, DRM-free ownership, the gap between the dream and the warehouse is the whole story. If the publisher approvals arrive, GOG could become the only major PC retailer shipping boxes; if they do not, the shelf stays digital.