This surprises me. Although it may not have been doing as well as they hoped, I'd be stunned if it couldn't be profitable on a skeleton crew - probably one part time guy doing support, and someone doing the accounting once a month. It's a reasonably well known portal, after all. There's probably something else going on, legal trouble or founder dispute or the like.
This reminds me of when iVideoSongs stopped updating. They had very high quality tutorial videos, and I've basically learned to play guitar from them. Having purchased 6 or 8 of the videos after the site was abandoned, I'm pretty happy they didn't just pull the plug like this. How anyone prefers to spend hours of their life learning a song to a crappy youtube video to save a few bucks is beyond me.
From the tweet, it sounds like they were fighting with publishers to keep things DRM-free. Still doesn't explain why the entire site was shut down, though.
A Cease & Desist would be a pretty good explanation. Part of that process is showing that you respected the owners' rights, etc. Taking down the whole site if just one publisher went after them is unlikely.. seems like there's something much bigger here.
Maybe a few publishers all attacking at the same time? Getting buried in legal isn't fun.. Or maybe not enough revenue? Or maybe a buyout or...? No inside info here.
I don't see how a C&D could possibly achieve this unless GOG was too broke to afford any legal representation at all. Even the scariest C&D letter from a single publisher shouldn't be enough to suspend GOG's agreements with other publishers, and for all the publishers to collude to shut down GOG wouldn't make much sense (why did they make agreements with GOG in the first place?), and ought to run afoul of antitrust laws anyways.
This reminds me of when iVideoSongs stopped updating. They had very high quality tutorial videos, and I've basically learned to play guitar from them. Having purchased 6 or 8 of the videos after the site was abandoned, I'm pretty happy they didn't just pull the plug like this. How anyone prefers to spend hours of their life learning a song to a crappy youtube video to save a few bucks is beyond me.