Polish Publisher CD Projekt Red Weights in on Loot Box Controversy
The spotlight is on microtransactions and loot boxes in particular. With a recently introducted Hawaii legislation to ban game distribution to customers under 21, publisher CD Projekt Red gives their two cents.
“‘Conversation’ sounds way too nice to describe what was happening last year,” said Marcin Iwiński, co-founder of the company. “I would rather call it community backlash. And this time around, it wasn’t just the hardcore community, there were a lot of really pissed off gamers out there and they decided to speak up.”
In particular, Iwiński adresses the fact that some analysts are questioning whether single-layer games are profitable anymore. As his company’s recent solo release The Witcher 3 was a big success last year, obviously he has a different opinion.
“Where we stand is quite simple and you could see it with all of our past releases—most recently The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and GWENT. If you buy a full priced game, you should get a big, polished piece of content, which gives you many, many hours of fun gameplay.”
“The definition of ‘many’ may vary on a title-by-title basis, but in our case it was always 50-60+ hours of the main story-line, with up to a couple of hundred of hours of side activities—if you really wanted to max out the title. To me, this is a fair deal. You get what you paid for, plus we are always trying our best to overdeliver. There is no better PR than a happy gamer recommending your title to their friends.”
The bottom line is CD Projekt Red’s Iwiński believes that transparency from developers in necessary to avoid this kind of backlash. If you’re going to be purchasing a game, it should be clear how much money is necessary in addition to the retail price to get a proper experience. According to him, gamers should get “numerous hours of gameplay and a significant amount of content.”
Hard to argue with that.