Q&A with Adam Kiciński and Marcin Iwiński @ GIT 2013
From Game Industry Trends 2013 in Warsaw, Adam Kiciński and Marcin Iwiński interviewed by Tomek Kreczmar.
Mostly general CDPR stuff.
Video in Polish here, translation mine
Part 1:
Tomek Kreczmar: The question I have after Martinez' [Marcin Przasnyski, CEO at StockWatch.pl and Polish gaming press veteran] presentation - so you just have to make good games and that's it? Really?
Marcin Iwiński: Well, Martinez' end note was really uplifting, because the more people in the industry I meet, the more people I see who don't really think like that. They're more like "we have great business model, we'll just tack on some game to it and that'll do". This kind of hit & run strategy sometimes works, but yeah. I disagree with one point - I also know some great games that failed tu succeed. Of course, that does raise the chances, but there's some hard competition in the market, and you have to help those games break through into the market, whether it's iOS, physical or digital distribution. So, quality is not enough. But without quality, chances of total failure rise exponentially. A while ago we talked with people from the industry, and "AAA games" - the sort of big console and PC titles that we make - were considered to be OK with above 80% average reviews. 80% weighted average on Metacritic and we're safe. Now, it's 85+. Now, I'm waiting for them to say 90+ o muerte, heh. So, the bar is definitely being raised, that's obvious. You only need to look at Metacritic and one of the sites that measure sales, Wiki Charts for example, and check the sales.[/B]
TK: [to Adam] Something to add?
Adam Kiciński: No. [laughs]
TK: What does the value of CD Projekt mean to you? Recently it's been very, very good, especially for investors.
AK: Of course, we're pleased about that, especially since we're shareholders ourselves. On the other hand, those are only numbers. We love that people trust us, since market value somehow represents that, but our focus is making games, since if our games are good, than the value will defend itself and, hopefully grow stronger. If we focused on stocks and charts then... that wouldn't bring us any money.
MI: Of course, this doesn't mean that we don't actively communicate, both with investors, financial institutions, but also gamers, the industry and the media. It's all one big ecosystem, and really, if we have a good game, then the biggest fear is the great unknown - dodging questions, "oh, we don't talk about that". No, we're talking hard, solid facts. Especially when it's about explaining certain situations. When we first entered the stock market, there were a lot of great unknowns. Adam and Piotr spent a lot of time explaining, clarifying how our industry works. Take what Marcin talked about in his last slide - how the accountancy wors, what the reserves are and so on.
AK: We had to explain very basic things, like why it's good to make one game at a time rather than five. To the average investor, it's obvious that a company that's making five products or projects concurrently is a company with low risk. You know, one product game not sell, but the other will. But right from the start, I tried explaining, and now they understand that when you have a finite number of talent - of course, additional talent does regularily come in, but creative energy resources are not infinite - and when you put all that energy into one project, then there's a higher chance of it being a good game. And if it's good, it will probably sell. But if you spread that talent across five projects, then it turns out that the chance that one of them will be really good dramatically drops. You make average games, make average sales, and it's difficult to generate some large upside from that. That was one of the things that we had to explain to the investors right from the start. Generally, what helps us communicate with the stock market is that we've always been very transparent in communicating with gamers, and that's the same tactic we use here. And the market looks favourably upon this. When the investor doesn't understand what the company's doing, if the company doesn't explain what it's doing or is hiding something, then he says "OK, that's risky, I don't get what's going on there". And if it's risky, then the price, the indices get lower. When he does understand, he's more willing to take bigger risks, and the valuation gets better.
MI: It's a system based on trust, really, on reputation. Like in games. If we're bluffing and it get called out on it, alarms go off and we get ticked in the millions of databases as "Warning: they like to BS, be careful, high risk penalty". And that's good, because you can very successfully build your reputation, even though the market is fickle, what works in our communication with gamers will work in the stock market as well, just like Adam said. If we're open, if we communicate, we reap the benefits. There can be some minor fluctuations, sure, but as long as the quality of the games is good, then I hope the rising trend will continue. Why are we talking about the stock market so much?...
TK: Right, We've strayed a bit with the conversation. Games. Not just computer, video games, since lately you've also been making board games, jigsaw puzzles... Someone might say you're exploiting the Witcher franchise as deep as it goes, on various levels. Is there any limit to this exploitation? Will the release of The Witcher 3 put this chapter to a close? Will you then shift towards Cyberpunk or something else still?
AK: Those are really two, or even three different things. First, games and the surrounding products. Games are our main focus, we do the rest to support the video games and provide people with a variety of entertainment in the area of the Witcher franchise. As far as continuing the saga goes... [looks to Marcin, smiles] we have to find some way to deftly address that. The saga is coming to an end, the story we've been telling throughout the first and second Witcher games, that ends in The Witcher 3. That's for sure. If we're going to do anything more with the world in the future, we'll see...
MI: No, no, that's simply out of the question, no future there. [laughs]
TK: That's what they said about Halo 3.
MI: Exactly. We're saying the same.
TK: How do you see yourselves after the Witcher 3 releases? There's great success, you've finished another chapter in the development of the company, what's next?
MI: Well, as you know, we're working on the next game, with our other team working on Cyberpunk, and that's going to be something new. A new quality in many respects, if only due to the nature of the universe, which will allow us to... damnit, I can't say more, since I'd be talking about the game and I can't do that now [laughs]. We're focused on The Witcher 3 right now. As Adam said before, it's not a smooth marketing answer but... all hands on deck. And this worked for us many times in key moments for our company, for example with our ditribution branch, CDP.pl, and it's biggest releases. There were some moments when, for a few months, with game develompent even for a year or a year and a half, we just put all our resources and energy into one area, because that's the winner, that's the future of our company. And that's what's happening with The Witcher 3. Don't forget this is our first game with a simultaneous release across three platforms, so that raises the bar for us, and of course we want to max out each platform. Adding to that are the side projects like the board game - we kind of glossed over that, but we do have an internal rule: we don't do average stuff. So it has to be a really fucking awesome board game. It might be a smaller project financially, but it's just as important for us as far as quality goes. If we're talking about expanding the universe then sure, additional products are cool, but whether it's a t-shirt, board game or a pen, they need to be super-high quality things. If we forget about this, license the franchise out to someone who releases a lot of crap, than it's us who suffer from that. Not worth it.
AK: Let me just add one thing. I disagree with Marcin on one detail - it's not like we're not doing anything else at the moment, with all hands on deck for The Witcher 3. The majority of our energy goes toward TW3, but Cyberpunk is going according to schedule as well, it's being developed. And after TW3 is done, we will probably continue to work on two large projects - then, Cyberpunk will be the leading project, with something else budding alongside. We also have a parallel, smaller calibre project - in size, not quality of course - being made in Kraków. So, in fact we're making three things at the same time right now, and it's probably going to stay that way.
TK: So, you're developing three video games right now.
AK: Yes. I do realise I'm contradicting myself a bit in regards to what I've said before, about focusing all talent on one thing. That's what we've been doing for almost 10 years, now we finally have enough talent that we decided to divide it across two bigger and one smaller part.
TK: Right. So the studio in Kraków is producing an entirely new thing. Why move part of your talent to Kraków? Or did you gather talent there?
AK: Precisely, talent appeared in Kraków. We didn't need to move anyone, we had the opportunity to relatively easily create a new team. Kraków had quite a few talented developers who didn't want to move to Warsaw. Those who did, we hired in Warsaw, but some of them were attached to Kraków and we decided to take them under our wing and open a branch there. So that's a new talent pool for RED.
TK: Any mobile market plans? Free to play? Casual? Or are you a stricte triple A, preferrably RPG developer?
MI: Well, I'll give a general answer. We think, we play, we analyze. But again, we focus on what we do best, which is large titles. I'm not saying there's no chance for something like that, but we need to be able to deliver really excellent quality. So, we talk, we prototype, we play with some things, but as I said - we're fully concentrated on The Witcher, then Cyberpunk. And if there's anything else along the way? Maybe, maybe not. We're not a huge company, a huge publisher. The market sometimes a bit absurdly expects everyone to conform to expectation of everyone entering each new segment which has the potential to grow. But then it turns out it fizzles out. I won't give any examples, but a lot of you probably know what I'm talking about. You really have to concentrate on what you do best. You only need to analyze the cases of, say, the top five globab publishers to see who is successful and who's not. Let's leave the financial aspect behind us, and look at the two main aspects: game quality and reception among gamers. Those two may sometimes not correlate, but usually a good game will get good reception. If you spread yourself too thin - even if you're a huge company, with, compared to us, practically infinite budgets - your problem will be talent, just like Adam said. At one point there won't be enough talent, enough focus, and everything will just fall apart. And everyone's like "Wait, they made such a great game that one time...", now they have 10, just nobody wants to play them.
AK: Let me add some more concrete answers. Casual? Probably no. We don't have any expertise in this regard. Also, it seems that success in that market is achieved differently than in ours. We focus on making something really good and succeeding thanks to that, while the casual market relies on a "spray and pray" approach - make a lot of games, and some will succeed. That's just totally not our style. Free to play? It's a business model. Whether we'll some day make anything based on it, hard to say. Not at this time. The Witcher 3 will be a regular retail game. Mobile? That's a platform. Again, maybe if there are no PCs in the future, only tablets, then we'll probably make games for them. We do have a minor mobile presence now, with the free Witcher comic, and our board game will also have a mobile version, we showed that at Gamescom. So, yes for mobile, but...
MI: ...In reasonable proportion.
AK: Yes.
Part 2
TK: I'm known for my polite questions, but maybe someone has some less restrained ones? If not, I do have a few more questions myself.
Q: I do have aquestion - are you willing to do anything with Metropolis legacy?
AK: There's very little left of that legacy, unfortunately. We don't want to continue with They, the decision has been made there. There are some licenses for very old games, we're looking into that, but other than that there's nothing left of Metropolis
MI: Maybe we'll do a TeenAgent 2 after The Witcher. [laughs]
Q: Are you planning some mobile ports, maybe? The Prince and the Beggar?
AK & MI: ...No.
Martinez: Maybe release them into public domain?
AK: We haven't thought about that much [laughs].
TK: Anyone else? If not, here's one from me: The future of GOG.com in the face of next-gen consoles. Don't you sometimes think to look into that? It seems that Macs, PCs, tablets... well, we'll probably be playing less on computers in the future. Currently it might not look that way, but...
MI: So far we're going in a completely opposite direction [laughs]. Sure, why not, but the specifics of each closed platform is that... it's closed, and they aren't letting anyone in. If we're talking about consoles, then we're a publisher, both for Microsoft with Xbox One, and Sony with PS4, and we're talking directly with them, but I haven't heard about any plans from them to let anyone else get a piece of their pie. If there are plans like that, then we'd obviously be interested, but it doesn't look that way. The platforms will remain closed, that's their business model. As far as the future goes, we're working on two really big R&D projects, as we already mentioned in the beginning of the year, but I can't reveal anything more about that because the competition does not sleep. We've got some very ambitious plans for growth. You very often hear phrases like "the PC isn't doing all that well", or "the PC is getting overtaken", that kind of stuff, but a large portion of innovation is happening on PC, because it's an open platform. Take the gigantic growth of indie games, for example. Both big console players have recently been saying (whatever we might think about that) at their conferences that support indie. And where do indies com from? PC. Some of those great new things on consoles are games that were already on the PC - on GOG even, because we also sell new indie games - months ago. Innovation is bred on open platforms. It might then be better exploited financially on the mass console market, but yeah. I have a lot of hope in the future of GOG and the PC as a platform in general. How will gaming look like? Certainly the PC will provide the newest, most innovative business models, because the PC allows for that, and the consoles react very slowly. Take World of Tanks for the Xbox 360. Huge new sensation, great, right? A few million gamers in the US will be playing it on the console. But is that really some great new discovery? No, because it's been on PC for a long time now.
TK: You mentioned the indie market, are you researching that? Maybe thinking of acquiring some studios?
AK: We're generally rather sceptical about building our company through acquisitions. I think we're better off producing value internally. You could probably buy some indie company, but the thing about indie is that it's indie, when you buy indie it stops being indie [laughs], and it doesn't make sense to own something like that. So, no. We do look at the indie market, we do have some friends there, but we're not planning to buy anyone.
MI: It's cool talking to indie people, very uplifting. Their strenghth lies in the mobility, often the small size, low costs. Those are huge strengths. They can do things that large companies would not dare to. And that's great, and it should stay that way. Sure, some of those companies will grow, but then that's no longer indie.
TK: So, you're no longer indie then.
AK: In some way, we are. I mean, we still think about ourselves like that, because we're independent. No one can tell me or Marcin what we're supposed to do, so we're indie.
MI: Unless it's my wife [laughs]. Those are hard negotiations.
TK: Right. So, Cyberpunk. Does it have a chance of success as big as The Witcher? I don't really mean international success here, I mean The Witcher is a stricte polish product. And that was really awesome, you took a character created in Poland, by a Polish author, you fleshed him out and gave him a new life. Sapkowski should be grateful, really. Cyberpunk is completely different, you took a known american RPG system, and, well, you're giving it a new life as well, but does that raise the chance of success as well?
MI: So, you're asking about Poland, right?
TK: Yeah, will it be as recognizable in Poland. The Witcher is recognizable, you're getting numerous awards, like from the President, your game is gifted to Barack Obama... It's something of a flagship, an export product.
MI: Well, The Witcher is polish, created by mr Sapkowski, and I won't pretend that didn't help us in a huge way locally, it gave us a great start. And we're very grateful for that. What we did with The Witcher was that we started from Eastern Europe and broke through to the West. When we first started talking about "The Witcher", because that was our translation, nobody knew what that was, we had to build the brand from the ground up. With Cyberpunk it's basically the other way around. We didn't hide our surprise at the success of the CGI trailer we created with Platige. We had anticipated a million, maybe two million views in our most aggressive expectations, now we're at about 8, 9 million in the first week and it's among the ten or fifteen hottest twitter topics in the US. So that went really well, but that's also thanks to Michael Pondsmith's huge base, because he created that. And that's cool, because we somewhat sensed the trend there. We took something that we had in our heads and, as you mentioned, dusted it off a bit, it was Cyberpunk, we said it's going to be Cyberpunk 2077. And suddenly, it's just like in Rejs [Polish comedy from 1970, source of memetic quotes], "I like the things I already know". I'm often hearing from people, mostly in the West, "that's a great idea, a great theme". So it really took of in the US, that's going to really help us across the ocean. Naturally, the situation will be the opposite of The Witcher, so we're going to put much more work into promoting it here, since there's no such tradition here. Pen and paper games here were a a small niche for hardcore gamers, and only some of those were into Cyberpunk. Incidentally, that's actually where the idea came from, in our studio. Probably around a dozen people here played it, while everyone knew The Witcher. So, yeah, the situation is inverted. In the end, it's all about recognizability, and I think that the hype coming from the States is going to help us and make things easier here, since we're all very susceptible to that as gamers, while going the other way around is very hard. Take the lack of success of practically any RPG game from Germany - we'd talked about it a lot when we were just starting as a studio, promoting The Witcher 1. Why, say, the Gothic series, really phenomenal RPGs, never took off in the States. The review analysis for Poland or Germany on one side and the US on the other was like 9/10 in Germany, praise like "super-toll" and all that, and in the US, "Crap, I started it up but the interface was strange so I gave up. 3/10." It's a completely different situation, completely different markets. So, the perception is going to be different too. We won't be trying to make Cyberpunk into some big polish hero when it never was one, right? [laughs]
AK: It's probably going to be a big american blockbuster made in Warsaw, and that's that.
MI: Though, Cyberpunk Warsaw does sound interesting.
TK: OK, thanks a lot, unless we have some more questions... Yes?
Q: About Cyberpunk, were you not worried that basing your game on an existing system would raise the bar of expectations from hardcore fans of the pen & paper game?
AK: We like our bars raised high, we raise them for ourselves, so that's fine.
MI: I think that this is again similar to The Witcher, since we were making the game both for the local audience, gamers from Eastern Europe who knew Sapkowski's books by heart, knew everything about them, for example the story of Triss never exposing her breasts while we did do that [laughs], then we had to somewhat fix that. I remember when Adam's brother Michał fought Adam Badowski over that, and of course, we caught a lot of flak over that on the forums. And again, the other group we were trying to appeal to is the wider market, so we couldn't assume that everyone playing the game would know The Witcher from the books. So we had those two layers. Cyberpunk is similar, we have to both respect the pen & paper fans, people who know the system inside out, moreover, add some flavour for them; and at the same time think outside that, because we're making a game for a wide audience. But I believe this can work together really nicely, and it can help establish the game in the market. If people see that we're going into a very deep level of analysis of the system, then sprinkle all those small details around, even if it's just a small dialogue line like "hey, I heard about this story where in this or that city...", that's really cool. I love stuff like that as a gamer and a reader.
AK: Also, speaking from a commercial point of view - even if we dislike that term - people who played the pen & paper game are our core audience , so if we did something wrong we'd have a huge problem right from the start, so we have to concentrate on that, making sure that the, well, millions of people who played Mike Pondsmith's game are satisfied.
Q: Since your company is really growing very fast, you're talking about the States next year, Kraków... The question is: what are the plans for that place, what's it called... the Citadel?
AK: That's not connected to CD Projekt.
Q: But can you say anything about that, you know...
AK: That's more of a real estate question [laughs]
Q: I'm just curious, really... About the development plans...
MI: Nah, the Citadel is a private project so we don't get bored after work hours. We bought an old fort from the Military Property Agency, to create a personal development center, a meditation center for ourselves to relax at after work. There's going to be vegetarian restaurant... We'll talk about that later, there's a long way to go still. Right now we're discovering all the beauty of renovating old, very moldy buildings, and the fact that we don't have as much of an influence on reality as we do on the virtual world - for example, we can't force the the fort to dry in less than a year or a year and a half [laughs]. So, it's little steps here, but we're involved in this as owners and we have people in charge of that. We're still fully invested in the company, nothing's changed here. The building is too small for a headquarters... Two levels, assuming half of the company would be in the dungeon with no light, on 1600 meters...
Q: Sounds like great atmosphere, I can't see anyone complaining! [laughs]
MI: Yeah, right. It's kind of hard to convince people to work there.[laughs]
Q: OK, so maybe something about the States...
AK: We have what's boisterously called an representation in the States, not very numerous, since it's just one person working there. But it's a very good person, and in time the office may grow to two, three, maybe four people. We're not fans of building huge structures, that's just unnecessary. What we needed was someone who'd look after our personal relations with retailers and key media, and that's what's being done. We'll probably get a few square meters some day, but most of what we do we do at Jagiellońska street. Kraków was something of a coincidence, just because there were a lot of talented people who wanted to work for us but didn't want to move to Warsaw. If they were willing to do that, they'd probably be working in Warsaw. It's an exception to the rule.
MI: Just a bit more about the States.. At the very beginning we mentioned game quality, and that needs some help. And that's exactly what it's about. A small office, just one person right now - and I'll be visiting shortly - really, just a few dozen square meters planned for just a few people, that's PR, marketing and sales supervision. Transferring our own RED energy, our outlook on reality. When it comes to the business side, we do have distributors for The Witcher 3, the first contract signed with Warner Brothers, but experience tells us that we work best when we look after things ourselves. We're helping them build the product. It's possible we'll be doing similar stuff with other markets, but still it's going to be very light. This is the time of digital distribution, of direct contact with gamers, so there's really no need for creating large, heavy structures. The other way around, really, large companies now suffer because of that, they have trouble purging it from their DNA, closing offices all around the world.
TK: One more quick question before the coffee break.
Q: Quick question: What did you learn entering outside markets? Did anything surprise you? Shock you? Did you have to redefine your way of thinking about marketing and so on? Or did you just copy from your local experience?
AK: In large, we did copy our experiences from Poland. Naturally, taking into account the specifics of the other markets. We're still learning. Surprises often come in rather subtle areas, I don't know if I have any example...
MI: [cannot contain laghter]
AK: ...Take sex in the US.
MI: Not out in the streets, mind you.
AK: Our approach to sex, which we thought was absolutely un-sexist, was received rather coldly in the States, which surprised us, because we thought what we showed was pretty OK from the perspective of the Witcher world. So, with the sequel we took a somewhat different approach.
MI: Sorry for my outbursts of laughter, but that's what I'm going to be talking about non-stop for the next few days, that's what my my job is. You need a lot of humility. Lots of listening, lots of talking to people, meeting with partners and learning the market. We need humility because despite the fact that we visit the States regularily, I'd never dare say I understand the american gamer, that I know what they want. I don't know that. So, we need to gather that experience and share it with the team, both from the distribution and the development side. whether you're doing a marketing campaign or creating the interface in a game, you need people who are gamers to do that, and you need them to come from those markets. The feeling that you understand something is always purely subjective. The realities are different there, we didn't grow up there, we don't know the cultural norms. And it's really small nuances sometimes, and I'm not talking about Asia, about Japan or China, that's a whole different world. I'm talking about the US, I'm talking about UK, I'm talking about France, Germany. The basic markets.
AK: To sum up, though, if there's something Poles like, then usually Australians or Americans will like it too. It's not like you need to create an entirely different product for Americans. It probably needs to be a bit simpler, and I'm far from making any judgements here, it's just that Americans are used to things being accessible...
MI: I disagree. You do need to create a different product, in the sense that the creative process is different. In part, it's like Adam says, but the bar is raised much higher. And this is the problem a lot of games from our region face when entering the western market. It's the interface, it's the tutorial... It's a different philosophy of making games, that we don't understand. It's an example I often give: we get a russian game, or a german one - there were a lot of those once, a bit less nowadays. The interface is set up so that we need to play it like this [puts hands into an uncomfortable position]. But the game has a cool story, so the hardcore gamer will contort his hands inside out and learn to play it like that. And the american will throw the game into the trash and never look back. The international market, depending on region, is much more demanding. I believe the introduction, the comunication with the player and the controls, all those are best made in the States. Iff we ad the "easy to play, hard to master" layer that Blizzard like to talk about, then we have an ideal product. There's the layer for the gamer who's accustomed to american reality where life is just simpler in general, and there's the deeper layer for the core gamer from Germany, Poland or Russia. So, creating such a product is much more difficult indeed.
AK: It is more difficult, but we're really talking about the same thing, it's just that I'm saying that interface which recquires that contorted hand position is just weak, it's weak for us too, except we're able to deal with it, and Americans aren't. But if the interface is good, if a Polish developer, his colleagues, a small group of testers think it's good, then it will probably be good enough for Americans. Our tastes are not that different here.
MI: Right, but...
TK: Right, but I have to stop you right there, so that we don't talk away the entire coffee break. You can still answer more questions off stage. Thank you very much!
MI & AK: Thanks!
***
That's all, thanks for reading
EDIT: ACK! Typo in thread title D:
EDIT2: Thanks for correcting, secondchildren
From Game Industry Trends 2013 in Warsaw, Adam Kiciński and Marcin Iwiński interviewed by Tomek Kreczmar.
Mostly general CDPR stuff.
Video in Polish here, translation mine
Part 1:
Tomek Kreczmar: The question I have after Martinez' [Marcin Przasnyski, CEO at StockWatch.pl and Polish gaming press veteran] presentation - so you just have to make good games and that's it? Really?
Marcin Iwiński: Well, Martinez' end note was really uplifting, because the more people in the industry I meet, the more people I see who don't really think like that. They're more like "we have great business model, we'll just tack on some game to it and that'll do". This kind of hit & run strategy sometimes works, but yeah. I disagree with one point - I also know some great games that failed tu succeed. Of course, that does raise the chances, but there's some hard competition in the market, and you have to help those games break through into the market, whether it's iOS, physical or digital distribution. So, quality is not enough. But without quality, chances of total failure rise exponentially. A while ago we talked with people from the industry, and "AAA games" - the sort of big console and PC titles that we make - were considered to be OK with above 80% average reviews. 80% weighted average on Metacritic and we're safe. Now, it's 85+. Now, I'm waiting for them to say 90+ o muerte, heh. So, the bar is definitely being raised, that's obvious. You only need to look at Metacritic and one of the sites that measure sales, Wiki Charts for example, and check the sales.[/B]
TK: [to Adam] Something to add?
Adam Kiciński: No. [laughs]
TK: What does the value of CD Projekt mean to you? Recently it's been very, very good, especially for investors.
AK: Of course, we're pleased about that, especially since we're shareholders ourselves. On the other hand, those are only numbers. We love that people trust us, since market value somehow represents that, but our focus is making games, since if our games are good, than the value will defend itself and, hopefully grow stronger. If we focused on stocks and charts then... that wouldn't bring us any money.
MI: Of course, this doesn't mean that we don't actively communicate, both with investors, financial institutions, but also gamers, the industry and the media. It's all one big ecosystem, and really, if we have a good game, then the biggest fear is the great unknown - dodging questions, "oh, we don't talk about that". No, we're talking hard, solid facts. Especially when it's about explaining certain situations. When we first entered the stock market, there were a lot of great unknowns. Adam and Piotr spent a lot of time explaining, clarifying how our industry works. Take what Marcin talked about in his last slide - how the accountancy wors, what the reserves are and so on.
AK: We had to explain very basic things, like why it's good to make one game at a time rather than five. To the average investor, it's obvious that a company that's making five products or projects concurrently is a company with low risk. You know, one product game not sell, but the other will. But right from the start, I tried explaining, and now they understand that when you have a finite number of talent - of course, additional talent does regularily come in, but creative energy resources are not infinite - and when you put all that energy into one project, then there's a higher chance of it being a good game. And if it's good, it will probably sell. But if you spread that talent across five projects, then it turns out that the chance that one of them will be really good dramatically drops. You make average games, make average sales, and it's difficult to generate some large upside from that. That was one of the things that we had to explain to the investors right from the start. Generally, what helps us communicate with the stock market is that we've always been very transparent in communicating with gamers, and that's the same tactic we use here. And the market looks favourably upon this. When the investor doesn't understand what the company's doing, if the company doesn't explain what it's doing or is hiding something, then he says "OK, that's risky, I don't get what's going on there". And if it's risky, then the price, the indices get lower. When he does understand, he's more willing to take bigger risks, and the valuation gets better.
MI: It's a system based on trust, really, on reputation. Like in games. If we're bluffing and it get called out on it, alarms go off and we get ticked in the millions of databases as "Warning: they like to BS, be careful, high risk penalty". And that's good, because you can very successfully build your reputation, even though the market is fickle, what works in our communication with gamers will work in the stock market as well, just like Adam said. If we're open, if we communicate, we reap the benefits. There can be some minor fluctuations, sure, but as long as the quality of the games is good, then I hope the rising trend will continue. Why are we talking about the stock market so much?...
TK: Right, We've strayed a bit with the conversation. Games. Not just computer, video games, since lately you've also been making board games, jigsaw puzzles... Someone might say you're exploiting the Witcher franchise as deep as it goes, on various levels. Is there any limit to this exploitation? Will the release of The Witcher 3 put this chapter to a close? Will you then shift towards Cyberpunk or something else still?
AK: Those are really two, or even three different things. First, games and the surrounding products. Games are our main focus, we do the rest to support the video games and provide people with a variety of entertainment in the area of the Witcher franchise. As far as continuing the saga goes... [looks to Marcin, smiles] we have to find some way to deftly address that. The saga is coming to an end, the story we've been telling throughout the first and second Witcher games, that ends in The Witcher 3. That's for sure. If we're going to do anything more with the world in the future, we'll see...
MI: No, no, that's simply out of the question, no future there. [laughs]
TK: That's what they said about Halo 3.
MI: Exactly. We're saying the same.
TK: How do you see yourselves after the Witcher 3 releases? There's great success, you've finished another chapter in the development of the company, what's next?
MI: Well, as you know, we're working on the next game, with our other team working on Cyberpunk, and that's going to be something new. A new quality in many respects, if only due to the nature of the universe, which will allow us to... damnit, I can't say more, since I'd be talking about the game and I can't do that now [laughs]. We're focused on The Witcher 3 right now. As Adam said before, it's not a smooth marketing answer but... all hands on deck. And this worked for us many times in key moments for our company, for example with our ditribution branch, CDP.pl, and it's biggest releases. There were some moments when, for a few months, with game develompent even for a year or a year and a half, we just put all our resources and energy into one area, because that's the winner, that's the future of our company. And that's what's happening with The Witcher 3. Don't forget this is our first game with a simultaneous release across three platforms, so that raises the bar for us, and of course we want to max out each platform. Adding to that are the side projects like the board game - we kind of glossed over that, but we do have an internal rule: we don't do average stuff. So it has to be a really fucking awesome board game. It might be a smaller project financially, but it's just as important for us as far as quality goes. If we're talking about expanding the universe then sure, additional products are cool, but whether it's a t-shirt, board game or a pen, they need to be super-high quality things. If we forget about this, license the franchise out to someone who releases a lot of crap, than it's us who suffer from that. Not worth it.
AK: Let me just add one thing. I disagree with Marcin on one detail - it's not like we're not doing anything else at the moment, with all hands on deck for The Witcher 3. The majority of our energy goes toward TW3, but Cyberpunk is going according to schedule as well, it's being developed. And after TW3 is done, we will probably continue to work on two large projects - then, Cyberpunk will be the leading project, with something else budding alongside. We also have a parallel, smaller calibre project - in size, not quality of course - being made in Kraków. So, in fact we're making three things at the same time right now, and it's probably going to stay that way.
TK: So, you're developing three video games right now.
AK: Yes. I do realise I'm contradicting myself a bit in regards to what I've said before, about focusing all talent on one thing. That's what we've been doing for almost 10 years, now we finally have enough talent that we decided to divide it across two bigger and one smaller part.
TK: Right. So the studio in Kraków is producing an entirely new thing. Why move part of your talent to Kraków? Or did you gather talent there?
AK: Precisely, talent appeared in Kraków. We didn't need to move anyone, we had the opportunity to relatively easily create a new team. Kraków had quite a few talented developers who didn't want to move to Warsaw. Those who did, we hired in Warsaw, but some of them were attached to Kraków and we decided to take them under our wing and open a branch there. So that's a new talent pool for RED.
TK: Any mobile market plans? Free to play? Casual? Or are you a stricte triple A, preferrably RPG developer?
MI: Well, I'll give a general answer. We think, we play, we analyze. But again, we focus on what we do best, which is large titles. I'm not saying there's no chance for something like that, but we need to be able to deliver really excellent quality. So, we talk, we prototype, we play with some things, but as I said - we're fully concentrated on The Witcher, then Cyberpunk. And if there's anything else along the way? Maybe, maybe not. We're not a huge company, a huge publisher. The market sometimes a bit absurdly expects everyone to conform to expectation of everyone entering each new segment which has the potential to grow. But then it turns out it fizzles out. I won't give any examples, but a lot of you probably know what I'm talking about. You really have to concentrate on what you do best. You only need to analyze the cases of, say, the top five globab publishers to see who is successful and who's not. Let's leave the financial aspect behind us, and look at the two main aspects: game quality and reception among gamers. Those two may sometimes not correlate, but usually a good game will get good reception. If you spread yourself too thin - even if you're a huge company, with, compared to us, practically infinite budgets - your problem will be talent, just like Adam said. At one point there won't be enough talent, enough focus, and everything will just fall apart. And everyone's like "Wait, they made such a great game that one time...", now they have 10, just nobody wants to play them.
AK: Let me add some more concrete answers. Casual? Probably no. We don't have any expertise in this regard. Also, it seems that success in that market is achieved differently than in ours. We focus on making something really good and succeeding thanks to that, while the casual market relies on a "spray and pray" approach - make a lot of games, and some will succeed. That's just totally not our style. Free to play? It's a business model. Whether we'll some day make anything based on it, hard to say. Not at this time. The Witcher 3 will be a regular retail game. Mobile? That's a platform. Again, maybe if there are no PCs in the future, only tablets, then we'll probably make games for them. We do have a minor mobile presence now, with the free Witcher comic, and our board game will also have a mobile version, we showed that at Gamescom. So, yes for mobile, but...
MI: ...In reasonable proportion.
AK: Yes.
Part 2
TK: I'm known for my polite questions, but maybe someone has some less restrained ones? If not, I do have a few more questions myself.
Q: I do have aquestion - are you willing to do anything with Metropolis legacy?
AK: There's very little left of that legacy, unfortunately. We don't want to continue with They, the decision has been made there. There are some licenses for very old games, we're looking into that, but other than that there's nothing left of Metropolis
MI: Maybe we'll do a TeenAgent 2 after The Witcher. [laughs]
Q: Are you planning some mobile ports, maybe? The Prince and the Beggar?
AK & MI: ...No.
Martinez: Maybe release them into public domain?
AK: We haven't thought about that much [laughs].
TK: Anyone else? If not, here's one from me: The future of GOG.com in the face of next-gen consoles. Don't you sometimes think to look into that? It seems that Macs, PCs, tablets... well, we'll probably be playing less on computers in the future. Currently it might not look that way, but...
MI: So far we're going in a completely opposite direction [laughs]. Sure, why not, but the specifics of each closed platform is that... it's closed, and they aren't letting anyone in. If we're talking about consoles, then we're a publisher, both for Microsoft with Xbox One, and Sony with PS4, and we're talking directly with them, but I haven't heard about any plans from them to let anyone else get a piece of their pie. If there are plans like that, then we'd obviously be interested, but it doesn't look that way. The platforms will remain closed, that's their business model. As far as the future goes, we're working on two really big R&D projects, as we already mentioned in the beginning of the year, but I can't reveal anything more about that because the competition does not sleep. We've got some very ambitious plans for growth. You very often hear phrases like "the PC isn't doing all that well", or "the PC is getting overtaken", that kind of stuff, but a large portion of innovation is happening on PC, because it's an open platform. Take the gigantic growth of indie games, for example. Both big console players have recently been saying (whatever we might think about that) at their conferences that support indie. And where do indies com from? PC. Some of those great new things on consoles are games that were already on the PC - on GOG even, because we also sell new indie games - months ago. Innovation is bred on open platforms. It might then be better exploited financially on the mass console market, but yeah. I have a lot of hope in the future of GOG and the PC as a platform in general. How will gaming look like? Certainly the PC will provide the newest, most innovative business models, because the PC allows for that, and the consoles react very slowly. Take World of Tanks for the Xbox 360. Huge new sensation, great, right? A few million gamers in the US will be playing it on the console. But is that really some great new discovery? No, because it's been on PC for a long time now.
TK: You mentioned the indie market, are you researching that? Maybe thinking of acquiring some studios?
AK: We're generally rather sceptical about building our company through acquisitions. I think we're better off producing value internally. You could probably buy some indie company, but the thing about indie is that it's indie, when you buy indie it stops being indie [laughs], and it doesn't make sense to own something like that. So, no. We do look at the indie market, we do have some friends there, but we're not planning to buy anyone.
MI: It's cool talking to indie people, very uplifting. Their strenghth lies in the mobility, often the small size, low costs. Those are huge strengths. They can do things that large companies would not dare to. And that's great, and it should stay that way. Sure, some of those companies will grow, but then that's no longer indie.
TK: So, you're no longer indie then.
AK: In some way, we are. I mean, we still think about ourselves like that, because we're independent. No one can tell me or Marcin what we're supposed to do, so we're indie.
MI: Unless it's my wife [laughs]. Those are hard negotiations.
TK: Right. So, Cyberpunk. Does it have a chance of success as big as The Witcher? I don't really mean international success here, I mean The Witcher is a stricte polish product. And that was really awesome, you took a character created in Poland, by a Polish author, you fleshed him out and gave him a new life. Sapkowski should be grateful, really. Cyberpunk is completely different, you took a known american RPG system, and, well, you're giving it a new life as well, but does that raise the chance of success as well?
MI: So, you're asking about Poland, right?
TK: Yeah, will it be as recognizable in Poland. The Witcher is recognizable, you're getting numerous awards, like from the President, your game is gifted to Barack Obama... It's something of a flagship, an export product.
MI: Well, The Witcher is polish, created by mr Sapkowski, and I won't pretend that didn't help us in a huge way locally, it gave us a great start. And we're very grateful for that. What we did with The Witcher was that we started from Eastern Europe and broke through to the West. When we first started talking about "The Witcher", because that was our translation, nobody knew what that was, we had to build the brand from the ground up. With Cyberpunk it's basically the other way around. We didn't hide our surprise at the success of the CGI trailer we created with Platige. We had anticipated a million, maybe two million views in our most aggressive expectations, now we're at about 8, 9 million in the first week and it's among the ten or fifteen hottest twitter topics in the US. So that went really well, but that's also thanks to Michael Pondsmith's huge base, because he created that. And that's cool, because we somewhat sensed the trend there. We took something that we had in our heads and, as you mentioned, dusted it off a bit, it was Cyberpunk, we said it's going to be Cyberpunk 2077. And suddenly, it's just like in Rejs [Polish comedy from 1970, source of memetic quotes], "I like the things I already know". I'm often hearing from people, mostly in the West, "that's a great idea, a great theme". So it really took of in the US, that's going to really help us across the ocean. Naturally, the situation will be the opposite of The Witcher, so we're going to put much more work into promoting it here, since there's no such tradition here. Pen and paper games here were a a small niche for hardcore gamers, and only some of those were into Cyberpunk. Incidentally, that's actually where the idea came from, in our studio. Probably around a dozen people here played it, while everyone knew The Witcher. So, yeah, the situation is inverted. In the end, it's all about recognizability, and I think that the hype coming from the States is going to help us and make things easier here, since we're all very susceptible to that as gamers, while going the other way around is very hard. Take the lack of success of practically any RPG game from Germany - we'd talked about it a lot when we were just starting as a studio, promoting The Witcher 1. Why, say, the Gothic series, really phenomenal RPGs, never took off in the States. The review analysis for Poland or Germany on one side and the US on the other was like 9/10 in Germany, praise like "super-toll" and all that, and in the US, "Crap, I started it up but the interface was strange so I gave up. 3/10." It's a completely different situation, completely different markets. So, the perception is going to be different too. We won't be trying to make Cyberpunk into some big polish hero when it never was one, right? [laughs]
AK: It's probably going to be a big american blockbuster made in Warsaw, and that's that.
MI: Though, Cyberpunk Warsaw does sound interesting.
TK: OK, thanks a lot, unless we have some more questions... Yes?
Q: About Cyberpunk, were you not worried that basing your game on an existing system would raise the bar of expectations from hardcore fans of the pen & paper game?
AK: We like our bars raised high, we raise them for ourselves, so that's fine.
MI: I think that this is again similar to The Witcher, since we were making the game both for the local audience, gamers from Eastern Europe who knew Sapkowski's books by heart, knew everything about them, for example the story of Triss never exposing her breasts while we did do that [laughs], then we had to somewhat fix that. I remember when Adam's brother Michał fought Adam Badowski over that, and of course, we caught a lot of flak over that on the forums. And again, the other group we were trying to appeal to is the wider market, so we couldn't assume that everyone playing the game would know The Witcher from the books. So we had those two layers. Cyberpunk is similar, we have to both respect the pen & paper fans, people who know the system inside out, moreover, add some flavour for them; and at the same time think outside that, because we're making a game for a wide audience. But I believe this can work together really nicely, and it can help establish the game in the market. If people see that we're going into a very deep level of analysis of the system, then sprinkle all those small details around, even if it's just a small dialogue line like "hey, I heard about this story where in this or that city...", that's really cool. I love stuff like that as a gamer and a reader.
AK: Also, speaking from a commercial point of view - even if we dislike that term - people who played the pen & paper game are our core audience , so if we did something wrong we'd have a huge problem right from the start, so we have to concentrate on that, making sure that the, well, millions of people who played Mike Pondsmith's game are satisfied.
Q: Since your company is really growing very fast, you're talking about the States next year, Kraków... The question is: what are the plans for that place, what's it called... the Citadel?
AK: That's not connected to CD Projekt.
Q: But can you say anything about that, you know...
AK: That's more of a real estate question [laughs]
Q: I'm just curious, really... About the development plans...
MI: Nah, the Citadel is a private project so we don't get bored after work hours. We bought an old fort from the Military Property Agency, to create a personal development center, a meditation center for ourselves to relax at after work. There's going to be vegetarian restaurant... We'll talk about that later, there's a long way to go still. Right now we're discovering all the beauty of renovating old, very moldy buildings, and the fact that we don't have as much of an influence on reality as we do on the virtual world - for example, we can't force the the fort to dry in less than a year or a year and a half [laughs]. So, it's little steps here, but we're involved in this as owners and we have people in charge of that. We're still fully invested in the company, nothing's changed here. The building is too small for a headquarters... Two levels, assuming half of the company would be in the dungeon with no light, on 1600 meters...
Q: Sounds like great atmosphere, I can't see anyone complaining! [laughs]
MI: Yeah, right. It's kind of hard to convince people to work there.[laughs]
Q: OK, so maybe something about the States...
AK: We have what's boisterously called an representation in the States, not very numerous, since it's just one person working there. But it's a very good person, and in time the office may grow to two, three, maybe four people. We're not fans of building huge structures, that's just unnecessary. What we needed was someone who'd look after our personal relations with retailers and key media, and that's what's being done. We'll probably get a few square meters some day, but most of what we do we do at Jagiellońska street. Kraków was something of a coincidence, just because there were a lot of talented people who wanted to work for us but didn't want to move to Warsaw. If they were willing to do that, they'd probably be working in Warsaw. It's an exception to the rule.
MI: Just a bit more about the States.. At the very beginning we mentioned game quality, and that needs some help. And that's exactly what it's about. A small office, just one person right now - and I'll be visiting shortly - really, just a few dozen square meters planned for just a few people, that's PR, marketing and sales supervision. Transferring our own RED energy, our outlook on reality. When it comes to the business side, we do have distributors for The Witcher 3, the first contract signed with Warner Brothers, but experience tells us that we work best when we look after things ourselves. We're helping them build the product. It's possible we'll be doing similar stuff with other markets, but still it's going to be very light. This is the time of digital distribution, of direct contact with gamers, so there's really no need for creating large, heavy structures. The other way around, really, large companies now suffer because of that, they have trouble purging it from their DNA, closing offices all around the world.
TK: One more quick question before the coffee break.
Q: Quick question: What did you learn entering outside markets? Did anything surprise you? Shock you? Did you have to redefine your way of thinking about marketing and so on? Or did you just copy from your local experience?
AK: In large, we did copy our experiences from Poland. Naturally, taking into account the specifics of the other markets. We're still learning. Surprises often come in rather subtle areas, I don't know if I have any example...
MI: [cannot contain laghter]
AK: ...Take sex in the US.
MI: Not out in the streets, mind you.
AK: Our approach to sex, which we thought was absolutely un-sexist, was received rather coldly in the States, which surprised us, because we thought what we showed was pretty OK from the perspective of the Witcher world. So, with the sequel we took a somewhat different approach.
MI: Sorry for my outbursts of laughter, but that's what I'm going to be talking about non-stop for the next few days, that's what my my job is. You need a lot of humility. Lots of listening, lots of talking to people, meeting with partners and learning the market. We need humility because despite the fact that we visit the States regularily, I'd never dare say I understand the american gamer, that I know what they want. I don't know that. So, we need to gather that experience and share it with the team, both from the distribution and the development side. whether you're doing a marketing campaign or creating the interface in a game, you need people who are gamers to do that, and you need them to come from those markets. The feeling that you understand something is always purely subjective. The realities are different there, we didn't grow up there, we don't know the cultural norms. And it's really small nuances sometimes, and I'm not talking about Asia, about Japan or China, that's a whole different world. I'm talking about the US, I'm talking about UK, I'm talking about France, Germany. The basic markets.
AK: To sum up, though, if there's something Poles like, then usually Australians or Americans will like it too. It's not like you need to create an entirely different product for Americans. It probably needs to be a bit simpler, and I'm far from making any judgements here, it's just that Americans are used to things being accessible...
MI: I disagree. You do need to create a different product, in the sense that the creative process is different. In part, it's like Adam says, but the bar is raised much higher. And this is the problem a lot of games from our region face when entering the western market. It's the interface, it's the tutorial... It's a different philosophy of making games, that we don't understand. It's an example I often give: we get a russian game, or a german one - there were a lot of those once, a bit less nowadays. The interface is set up so that we need to play it like this [puts hands into an uncomfortable position]. But the game has a cool story, so the hardcore gamer will contort his hands inside out and learn to play it like that. And the american will throw the game into the trash and never look back. The international market, depending on region, is much more demanding. I believe the introduction, the comunication with the player and the controls, all those are best made in the States. Iff we ad the "easy to play, hard to master" layer that Blizzard like to talk about, then we have an ideal product. There's the layer for the gamer who's accustomed to american reality where life is just simpler in general, and there's the deeper layer for the core gamer from Germany, Poland or Russia. So, creating such a product is much more difficult indeed.
AK: It is more difficult, but we're really talking about the same thing, it's just that I'm saying that interface which recquires that contorted hand position is just weak, it's weak for us too, except we're able to deal with it, and Americans aren't. But if the interface is good, if a Polish developer, his colleagues, a small group of testers think it's good, then it will probably be good enough for Americans. Our tastes are not that different here.
MI: Right, but...
TK: Right, but I have to stop you right there, so that we don't talk away the entire coffee break. You can still answer more questions off stage. Thank you very much!
MI & AK: Thanks!
***
That's all, thanks for reading
EDIT: ACK! Typo in thread title D:
EDIT2: Thanks for correcting, secondchildren
