There’s no doubt that when you think CD Projekt RED the first thing that comes to mind is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or just The Witcher franchise in general. Lauded for their games they are one of the most well respected developers in the business. This is no surprise given Marcin Iwiński, one of the cofounders of the company, has clearly shown that appreciating their customers time and money is of the utmost priority to them.
A few years ago, and by a few we mean nearly four, CDPR made an announcement on another franchise that whipped fans into a frenzy in a hurry. The game was Cyberpunk 2077, which was to be based on the successful tabletop RPG, Cyberpunk from Mike Pondsmith. Taking its cues from the tabletop success the team at CDPR has gone on a long journey developing this AAA release. For the most part they’ve been more than tight lipped about it all as we’ve seen next to nothing come out of the Polish studio talking about the game since. Hell, some people totally forgot the game was even announced.
Speaking recently with Gamespot, Marcin Iwiński pointed out that not only is the Polish studio now fully devoted to continuing and finishing the development of Cyberpunk 2077, but that in the long run they won’t rush anything just to get a product to shelves. The game will take as long as it takes, be released when it’s ready, and be better off for it. Something a lot of developers could keep in mind perhaps.
We had a lot of these discussions, but I think we have enough on our plate right now. What we do requires 100%, actually 200% commitment. We are not into buying and owning IPs just for the sake of buying and owning them.
We actually were approached by a lot of people with really cool IPs that we love to make a game, but we said “Hey, if we do something we have to have full creative control, we have to own the IP”, but again, for the sake of full creative control. Cyberpunk was a choice from the heart, I think also it was just good karma because we just had a great opportunity to acquire the rights, but I think we’ll stop here for a while.
We are committed. We’ll take as much time as needed and we want to make it huge. That’s what’s on our mind.
If we invest into something, and I’m talking about investing our time, we have to focus because we cannot do it right if we’ll do even two or three things at the same time. It’s just not possible and it’s really regardless of how many people we have on board. It’s a mentality thing, a little bit like Rockstar – why there isn’t a game [from Rockstar] every single year? There is a reason for that.
You can have a different model, the FIFA model, the Call of Duty model, the Assassin’s Creed model, but I don’t think it’s our model.
With the focus clearly shifting off The Witcher to move on to Cyberpunk 2077 it’s possible we might be able to get a bit more on this very much anticipated game sooner than you think. Managing Director Adam Badowski has even hinted as much when he recently stated that the gameplay premier was on the horizon. With GDC come and gone perhaps we can look forward to an E3 reveal in the near future? We can only hope.