Company News CD Project RED sales figures for 2011

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Tags: The Witcher; The Witcher 2

CD Projekt RED announced their sales figures for 2011:

Unfortunately that's still spare change compared to real AAA titles.

1.1 million aren't that good for an AAA title,no wonder they are porting it to the XBAWKS.They might be good for a PC only title I guess

400k for an 2007/2008 title are very good on the other hand.I don't now what is the usual jump in the sales of an old title when a sequel comes out but 400k look impressive to me

Who thinks it's a 'AAA' title in the western sense? A 'AAA' title needs a budget at least several orders of magnitude higher at least than the paltry $10 million that TW2 cost. Maybe for a potato production and their own attempts at hyping it up with phrases like 'AAA' it would appear to be but compared to GTA4's 100 million it's not in the same galaxy to be AAA. With that in mind, selling 1.1 million copies mostly at retail and not for chump change on Steam equals a lot of monies. The outlay has also led to 400,000 copies of TW1 being sold and even if they went for a couple dollars each, that's a minimum of a million extra dollars directly due to the creation of TW2. Porting to the XBox is virtually pure profit as the game is done already and would only have cost a fraction of the initial cost to port. Even a few hundred thousand sales on XBox would pay off handsomely.

1.1 million for a PC title with a tiny marketing budget compared to the big players and a small development cost is worth 5 million sales of Dragon Age or Mass Effect on all platforms. Incidentally the actual PC sales of Dragon Age and Mass Effect are not much better comparatively despite the money thrown at them. Oh and DA II cost more to make than TW2 and sold fuck all on the PC.

I dislike all this negativity regarding any game that doesn't sell 10 million copies or more like CoD as if that's some kind of standard to judge a games' worth. One only needs to sell enough to break even and if you outlay little then you need to sell much less to do so. Once you reach that break even point, the rest is profit and the lower the bar is, the quicker you will make money. With CDPR announcing 5 titles all of a sudden(two of them RPG's of the Polish version of AAA) it's clear that their strategy is working and has given confidence in their investors for the future.

Exucse me for asking but there are couple of thing i don't understand.

First, since when is 8 million $ not a good profit?

Second, what actually means that a game title is AAA? I know what that means in terms of finacial ratings. I know what a AAA maple top is on a Les Paul guitar. But what features does a game must have to be considered AAA? Is it conected to the cost of making one or something else?

I see I wasn't sarcastic enough.

They had lots upon lots of goodies in retail - booklets, CDs with music, manuals. Standard edition looked like normal collector's edition by todays standard.

Standard:


Collector's:

This is a little disappointing. TW2 is easily on the same level with ME series in terms of having mainstream appeal. They should up their game in marketing. Even GOG.com is still virtually unknown.

So I guess that means Witcher 3 will have even more console-centric design in an effort to appeal to the masses.

It doesn't matter unless they kick marketing into hyperdrive. And then they wouldn't need dumbing down either.

Yep. Eye candy graphics, xtreme grimdarkness, game feels pretty much like a movie, etc. The game had all the potential to totally outsell other RPGs in the market.
The only danger here is if they would spend more moneyz on marketing than on the actual game, as it seems to happen with some products nowadays. Well, I don't think potatoland has that kind of money anyway.

Digital distribution isn't really all that popular in non-North American places (where the Witcher is the most popular) for various reasons.

I think it's good news and I never made it past the first chapter of TW1, but what the hell, they're making money. Although they don't all cater to my tastes, I'm happy for them. Now if it had been Pirahna Bytes in the article I'd be ecstatic. Or Larien. . GO GO developers. Find your niche and stick to it!

One mill sounds like a nice target for global sales, but like someone else said, I am surprised the digital-dist sales numbers weren't reversed.

Skyrim of Witcher 3: Reckoning

Actually given these numbers I don't think ME on PC sold much more. Hell, it probably sold less.
More than a million in slightly more than half year isn't bad at all for a game with virtually no marketing and promotion outside the gaming press and with such a low budget.

Also, the game was quite demanding as hardware specifics go and PC titles thanks to digital distribution have tons of long tail sales at virtually no additional costs these days.
They are going to make good money out of this.

I don't think anyone knows for sure. Development/marketing budget, production value, (expected) revenue generated... or a combination thereof. But more than anything it's just another buzzword.

I remember them saying that the sales number for TW 1 was over a million already. Am I mistaken?

Well an AAA production should have tons of pre-order dlcs unlocking content which actually exists in a base game; also some that unlocks content from other games (of EA..). A real AAA production is also a port from consoles... so clearly The Witcher doesn't stand a chance.

That's 400k sales of TW1 in the last year if I understand it correctly. They had cheap deals on it on GOG to hype TW2, but still seems unbelievably high for such an "old" game.

Oh. My mistake. Thanks.

Witcher 2 was already such a pile of shit that consolization isn't going to make any difference.

That explains why you put in on top of your chest instead of in your PC.

ME is a third person shooter, TW2 isn't. The market for TW2 is smaller without a doubt, its doesn't appeal to FPS players.

Voice of the masses