Across three platforms, three games and tons of DLC, CD Projekt Red’s rendition of The Witcher series dating back to 2007 has managed to sell a collective 25 million copies.
DSO Gaming picked up the news from the official fiscal results that CD Projekt posted up over on their site. They announced that they’ve managed more than 1 billion Polish zloty from sales of The Witcher 3 over the course of a year and a half, and the series in total has managed to sell over 25 million copies across the Xbox 360, PC, Xbox One and PS4.
They mentioned that despite spending the equivalent of $15 million on ongoing projects throughout the year, they were up a net positive of $52 million in profits.
The Witcher 3 and its expansion packs have managed to rack in $250 million for CD Projekt Red since releasing in 2015, giving them a healthy base of financing to work with for their upcoming games such as Cyberpunk 2077, and the ongoing development of their free-to-play game Gwent.
Just like that, CD Projekt Red has managed to force their way into the AAA space with high-quality games and a dedication to the craft by making timeless classics.
They’ve literally done the complete opposite of BioWare, who decided to jettison their reputation and the integrity of their brands by releasing games heavily mired in sociopolitical talking points clearly and conspicuously aligned with America’s extremist brand of left-wing Liberal ideologies. This backfired on BioWare badly with Mass Effect: Andromeda, from having a racist game designer influence the game, to bringing in diversity hires who weren’t competent enough to churn out a quality product, BioWare decided to play the identity politics game where merit and competency was required, and they failed miserably.
Hopefully BioWare’s focus on virtue signaling over making a good product is a lesson learned by every other AAA developer out there, and hopefully they’ll put the identity politics aside and focus on making good, worthwhile games.
A lot of pressure is now being mounted on CD Projekt Red to deliver a real AAA quality RPG experience in Cyberpunk 2077. So we’ll see if they can knock it out of the ballpark the way they did with The Witcher 3.
(Main image courtesy of SynthXIII)
