Interview CDP interview over at RPS, on Cyberpunk and DRM

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Tags: CD Projekt; Cyberpunk; Cyberpunk 2020; DRM; The Witcher; The Witcher 2

Marcin Iwinski had a chat with Rock Paper Shotgun. He doesn't really say a lot about Cyberpunk since it's still very early in development, but it's a decent read nonetheless.

RPS: This is the second time you’ve chosen to adapt a setting with a heavy literary background. And it seems like, a lot of the time, books tend to lend themselves to games better than, say, TV shows or movies.

Iwinski: [chuckles] Game of Thrones.

But yeah, when I started the company in 1994 with a friend, we first got a lot of experience on the business side of things. So we were looking at a lot of games for distribution and working with a lot of people, and what sank a lot of creations was that the world, setting, and idea were shallow. Incomplete. And if you look at The Witcher, the author spent 16 years writing it. That’s an amazing foundation. So let’s say you’re working on a game, and it’s a four-year development cycle. So you’re spending, what, a year creating the world? What’s that compared to a book by someone like George R.R. Martin? So you have a very profound, deep thing, and it’s much easier to build a game around it. Movies don’t have that.

RPS: Is there any interest at CD Projekt in breaking out of that cycle and creating wholly unique worlds – removed from someone else’s license?

Iwinski: We definitely want to do things right. So obviously, we’re not abandoning The Witcher. We’re not talking about what’s next right now, but you can guess it’ll be happening sometime in the future. And then there’s Cyberpunk [occupying our other team]. So, for the foreseeable future, that’s what we’ll be focusing on. And these aren’t just books or – in Cyberpunk’s case – pen-and-paper games. They’re worlds. And they allow us to tell great stories with different kinds of gameplay. And we probably could’ve just stuck with The Witcher, but it’s a new setting. So it’s great for our developers who wanted to try different things. Because, for some, it’s like “How many more years will I be working on swords?” So now they can work on great guns or implants. I think that’s a good balance for us.

I’m not saying “no” [to the idea of a wholly original IP], but we’ll take probably a long time to come up with a system.

Go here for the full interview.

- And so, with Diablo III, people complain [about DRM] on forums and things, but they still go out and buy it. And I’m one of those people. [laughs]

- But yeah, I think a lot of companies – a lot of people in the industry – they want to put their worlds and experiences online because it enhances the life cycle of the product and people spend more time with it. That’s where the industry’s going, and we can already see it at this show. A lot of online games with lots of people talking about DLC.

- And, whether we like it or not, it’ll probably go this way.

- I feel that there’s still a place for offline single-player experiences, but there’s more and more people who want to play online. So they’ll get what they want. And this will be, on the business level, a much better concept to monetize.

- Because, whatever single-player game you release and whatever protection you put on it, it will be cracked. It will be pirated.

- Diablo II – in our experience in distributing it in Poland – is one of the best-selling games ever. People still buy it today, and it’s mid-priced. It’s not even budget yet – after 10 or 11 years, because people still want to be part of Battle.net.

Further proof that, despite how zillions of people lament oppression from this point of view, they feed it consistently with their own actions.
Hooray for mankind!

Also, lets not forget that CD Projek went for their own brand of DRM in form of actively fucking suing people - through some specialized money grabbing mothefurcking companies - after all their fucking hype and PR bullshit about being against DRM.

By which they meant... - we are actually against DRM that doesnt work.

Fixed. DRM can work (ArmA series) with 100% effectiveness. It still doesn't give lawsuit money.