CD Projekt RED - Interview @ Digitally Downloaded
Digitally Downloaded is offering an interview with CD Project Red's Michal Nowakowski, who is responsible for Business Development, on a variety of topics like the importance of fan support, sex in games, releases and the business aspect of things.
DD: The Witcher 3 will be the first game you release simultaneously on consoles with PC. Do you consider consoles a critical part of your growth strategy?
MN: It depends on the particular market. In Europe, we have markets where PC is the dominating platform, while the console market is really strong in the US. Having a multiplatform release does not only increase your audiences, but diversifies your risks worldwide.
Developing a game for different platforms is a little different than for a single one, but we want the Witcher 3 to be designed so it feels appropriate for wherever you play it. This means we are putting a lot of detail in designing the interface and other features, so it uses the maximal potential each platform gives us.
The release of the Witcher 2 of Xbox 360 gave us a lot of experience and has also proven that our target group – mature and ambitious players - is widely present on that platform. Many people say that console and PC players look for different types of entertainment. The success of The Witcher 2 on Microsoft’s platform, shows that even if it is true, there is still a large audience for our games who want to play them in front of a TV, with a gamepad in their hands.
DD: You have one of the most loyal fan bases of any major development studio. What do you attribute your success in building this loyalty to?
Quality is the answer. The content you deliver should be top-notch, that’s the best way to have fans. We also are gamers ourselves and when thinking about our future we ask ourselves, “how would I react to this as a player?” And generally the answers are simple – we don’t like to be milked for money, or cheated and we’d like to be treated as partners.
As developers, we are aware how much we owe to the players who decided to buy our game. Fair treatment is our way of saying thank you.
That’s why we removed DRM from our game on PC when it posed more problems for legit users. We also didn’t support paid DLCs for small chunks of content and even gave the Enhanced Edition upgrade for The Witcher 2 for free. Also every owner of our game received a free digital back-up copy on GOG.com and we still patch and improve our titles.
Our fans help us a lot. Three new language versions have been created thanks to fan-support. We tested those and officially released patches allowing players to play in Turkish, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese.
These are really small gestures from us as a developer and we love our fans, so we have even more goodies prepared for you.