The Witcher: One million sold, plus new CD Projekt game teased at

by: Randy - posted: 10/30/2008 10:40:00 PM

CD Projekt RED is making back some of the $11 million it spent developing The Witcher and announced over 1 million copies sold of the dark horse RPG over the past year.  It was in February that they boasted over 600,000 copies sold, and The Witcher: The Enhanced Edition, released only a month ago, certainly did its part in pushing the numbers up over the platinum mark.  This will pretty much make The Witcher a shoo-in for CD Projekt's GOG.com (Good Old Games) digital distribution platform ... once the game's old enough.

Co-founder of CD Projekt, Michal Kicinkski, is also strongly hinting that The Witcher might someday pull off the leap to Xbox 360 and/or PlayStation 3:  "...There's obviously a huge audience out there that would still love to see the game on consoles...  We're PC developers first and foremost, but you never know!"  Plus, CD Projekt is just about ready to blow the lid off a multi-platform project underway at Metropolis Software, a company that CD Projekt recently acquired a majority stake in.

This one year anniversary video is mostly a victory lap (high-fives, everyone), but it also sneaks in sci-fi shooter images of the unannounced project.  They're admittedly less intriguing than The Witcher imagery, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for the moment.

The Witcher Sells a Million

Scientists Uncover Irrefutable Evidence that Single-Player PC Gaming is not Dead as CD Projekt RED’s RPG of the Year Breaks Sales Milestone

 

Warsaw, Poland – October 30 – All the ghouls, vampires and wenches in the world couldn’t stop the white-haired Geralt from conquering the world! CD Projekt RED is proud to announce that The Witcher, the epic RPG that puts players in the morally lenient boots of the aforementioned anti-hero, has sold more than a million copies to real, live people since its release twelve months ago. Scientific research has proven that those sales numbers are quite good for a debut game based on a relatively unfamiliar IP from an unknown studio on a “dead” platform.

 

The news comes just weeks after the release of The Witcher: Enhanced Edition, which was developed based on fan feedback to further improve the game that was named PC RPG of the Year by IGN, GameSpy, PC Gamer, Play and many more. The studio spent close to a year improving various facets of the game to deliver the ultimate role-playing game, then released the update for free to existing fans and loaded the retail package with extra value to encourage retail sales. As always, it seems that the customer is always right, as the Enhanced Edition is getting higher review scores than the original across the globe.

 

“We created The Witcher with the intent of becoming an acclaimed and successful development studio that always made games for its fans; we spent more than $11 million developing The Witcher and the Enhanced Edition, and it sure is nice to make some of that money back!” said Adam Kicinski, CEO of CD Projekt RED. “The success of The Witcher has ensured that we’ll be able to make the games we want – and the games that fans want – for the foreseeable future, and the amazing response we had from the gaming community to the Enhanced Edition really reinforced that we’re on the right track with our development philosophy. We really couldn’t have achieved this sort of success without the support of our amazing fans.”

 

“This is really just the beginning for us,” said Michal Kicinski, co-founder of CD Projekt. “There are a lot more places to explore in the world of The Witcher and there’s obviously a huge audience out there that would still love to see the game on consoles… we’re PC developers first and foremost, but you never know! We’ve already unveiled our DRM-free classic-games distribution site at GOG.com, and we intend to build that site aggressively in the coming months. We’re also rather close to breaking our silence about the multi-platform project underway at Metropolis Software, in which we recently acquired a majority stake. Needless to say, we’re very excited about the future and we think gamers will be, too!”