CD Projekt

CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwiński in 2011

CD Projekt was founded in May 1994 by Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński.[10] According to Iwiński, although he enjoyed playing video games as a child they were scarce in Poland (which was in the Soviet Union's sphere of influence at the time). Marcin Iwiński, in high school, sold cracked copies of Western video games at a Warsaw marketplace.[11] In high school, Iwiński met Kiciński, who became his business partner; at that time, Kiciński also sold video games.[12]

Wanting to conduct business legitimately, Iwiński and Kiciński began importing games from US retailers and were the first importers of CD-ROM games.[13] After Poland's transition to a primarily market-based economy in the early 90s, they founded their own company. Iwiński and Kiciński founded CD Projekt in the second quarter of 1994. With only $2,000, they used a friend's flat as a rent-free office.[11][12]

When CD Projekt was founded, their biggest challenge was overcoming video game piracy. The company was one of the first in Poland to localize games; according to Iwiński, most of their products were sold to "mom-and-pop shops". CD Projekt began partial localization for developers such as Seven Stars and Leryx-LongSoft in 1996, and full-scale localization a year later.[14] According to Iwiński, one of their first successful localization titles was for Ace Ventura; whereas previous localizations had only sold copies in the hundreds, Ace Ventura sold in the thousands, establishing the success of their localization approach.[15] With their methods affirmed, CD Projekt approached BioWare and Interplay Entertainment for the Polish localization of Baldur's Gate. They expected the title to become popular in Poland, and felt that no retailer would be able to translate the text from English to Polish. To increase the title's popularity in Poland, CD Projekt added items to the game's packaging and hired well-known Polish actors to voice its characters. Their first attempt was successful, with 18,000 units shipped on the game's release day (higher than the average shipments of other games at the time).[11][12]

The company continued to work with Interplay after the release of Baldur's Gate, collaborating on a PC port for the sequel Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. To develop the port, CD Projekt hired Sebastian Zieliński (who had developed Mortyr 2093-1944) and Adam Badowski. Six months after development began, Interplay experienced financial problems and cancelled the PC version. CD Projekt continued to localize other games after Dark Alliance's cancellation, and received Business Gazelle awards in 2003 and 2004.[16]

CD Projekt Red's logo since May 2014

Enthusiasm for game distribution ebbed, and CD Projekt's founders wondered if the company should continue as a distributor or a game developer after Dark Alliance's cancellation. With the game cancelled and its code owned by CD Projekt, the company planned to use them to develop their first original game.[11][12] They intended to develop a game series based on Andrzej Sapkowski's Wiedźmin books (which were popular in Poland) and the author accepted the company's development proposal. The franchise rights had been sold to a Polish mobile game studio, but the studio had not worked on anything related to the franchise and CD Projekt acquired the rights to the Wiedźmin franchise. According to Iwiński, he and Kiciński had no idea how to develop a video game at that time.[12]

To develop the game, the company formed a video-game development studio (CD Projekt Red Sp. z o.o., headed by Sebastian Zieliński) in Łódź in 2002. The studio made a demonstration game, which Adam Badowski called "a piece of crap" in retrospect. The demo was a role-playing game with a top-down perspective, similar to Dark Alliance and Diablo, and used the game engine which powered Mortyr.[17] Iwiński and Kiciński pitched the demo to a number of publishers, without success. The Łódź office closed and the staff, except for Zieliński, moved to the Warsaw headquarters.[12]

Zieliński left the company, and Kiciński headed the project. Although the game's development continued, the demo was abandoned. According to CD Projekt, the development team had different ideas for the game and lacked overall direction; as a result, it was returned to the drawing board in 2003.[18][19] The team, unfamiliar with video-game development, spent nearly two years organising production.[13] They received assistance from BioWare, who helped promote the game at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo by offering CD Projekt space in their booth next to Jade Empire. BioWare also licensed their Aurora game engine to the company.[20]

The game's budget exceeded expectations. The original 15-person development team expanded to about 100, at a cost of 20 million złoty. According to Iwiński, content was removed from the game for budgetary reasons but the characters' personalities were retained; however, there was difficulty in translating the game's Polish text into English.[21] Atari agreed to publish the game.[22] After five years of development,[13] the game brought Wiedźmin to an international audience, and so the company came up with an English name: The Witcher. The Witcher was released in 2007 to generally positive reviews.[23]

Sales were satisfactory, and the development of sequels began almost immediately after The Witcher's release. The team began the design work for The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and experimented with consoles to develop a new engine for The Witcher 3. Their development was halted when the team began work on The Witcher: White Wolf, a console version of The Witcher.[12] Although they collaborated with French studio Widescreen Games for the console port, it entered development limbo. Widescreen demanded more manpower, money and time to develop the title, complaining that they were not being paid;[24] according to Iwiński, CD Projekt paid them more than their own staff members. The team cancelled the project, suspending its development.[25] Unhappy with the decision, Atari demanded that CD Projekt repay them for funding the console port development and Iwiński agreed that Atari would be the North American publisher of the sequel of The Witcher 2.[12] CD Projekt acquired Metropolis Software in 2008.[26]

CD Projekt Red receiving the European Games Award for The Witcher 2 at gamescom 2012

The dispute over White Wolf was costly; the company faced bankruptcy,[27] with the financial crisis of 2007–08 as a contributing factor.[12] To stay afloat, the team decided to focus on The Witcher 2 with the Witcher 3 engine. When the engine (known as Red Engine) was finished, the game could be ported to other consoles.[28] To develop The Witcher 2, the company suspended development of Metropolis' first-person shooter, titled They.[29] After three-and-a-half years of development, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was released in 2011 to critical praise[12] and sales of more than 1.7 million copies.[30]

After The Witcher 2, CD Projekt wanted to develop an open-world game of a quality similar to their other games, and the company wanted to add features to avoid criticism that it was Witcher 2.5. They wanted to push the game's graphics boundaries, releasing it only for the PC and eighth-generation consoles. This triggered debate on the team, some of whom wanted to release the game for older consoles to maximise profit.[12] The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt took three-and-a-half years to develop[13] and cost over $81 million.[12][31] After multiple delays, it was released in May 2015 to critical praise.[32] Wild Hunt was commercially successful, selling six million copies in its first six weeks and giving the studio a profit of 236 million złoty ($62.5 million) in the first half of 2015.[33][34] The team released 16 free content downloads and two paid expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.[35] CD Projekt released two other The Witcher games: The Witcher Adventure (a board game for PC, iOS and Android)[36] and The Witcher: Battle Arena, a multiplayer online battle arena game for iOS and Android.[37]

In December 2015, CD Projekt Red won the "Developer of the Year" award at The Game Awards 2015.[38] In March 2016, the company announced that they had another role-playing game in development, and that the title is scheduled to be released in the period of 2017 to 2021. They also announced plans for expansion, where the Red division will expand two-fold.[39] At E3 2016, the company announced Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, based on the popular card game known as Gwent from The Witcher 3.[40]

In March 2018, the opening of a new studio in Wrocław, supporting the development of Cyberpunk 2077, was announced. Acquired from a studio called Strange New Things, it is headed by former Techland COO Pawel Zawodny and composed of other ex-Techland, IO Interactive, and CD Projekt Red employees.[41] In August 2018, CD Projekt established Spokko, a development studio focused on mobile gaming.[42]

REDengine is a game engine developed by CD Projekt Red exclusively for their nonlinear role-playing video games.[43] It is the replacement of the Aurora Engine CD Projekt Red had previously licensed from BioWare for the development of The Witcher.

REDengine is portable across 32- and 64-bit software platforms and runs under Microsoft Windows.[43] REDengine was first used in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for Microsoft Windows.[44] REDengine 2, an updated version of REDengine used in The Witcher 2,[43] also runs under Xbox 360[45] and both OS X[46] and Linux, however these ports were made using a compatibility layer similar to Wine called eON. REDengine 3 was designed exclusively for a 64-bit software platform, and also runs under PlayStation 4,[47] Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

REDengine 2 utilized middleware such as Havok for physics, Scaleform GFx for the user interface, and FMOD for audio.[48] The engine was used for the Xbox 360 port of The Witcher 2.[49]

REDengine 3 was designed to run exclusively on a 64-bit software platform. CD Projekt Red created REDengine 3 for the purpose of developing open world[43] video game environments, such as those of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It introduces improvements to facial and other animations.[43] Lighting effects no longer suffer from reduced contrast ratio.[43] REDengine 3 also supports volumetric effects enabling advanced rendering of clouds, mist, fog, smoke, and other particle effects. There is also support for high-resolution textures and mapping, as well as dynamic physics and an advanced dialogue lip-syncing system. However, due to limitations on texture streaming, the use of high-resolution textures may not always be the case.

REDengine 3 has a flexible renderer prepared for deferred or forward+ rendering pipelines.[43] The result is a wide array of cinematic effects, including bokeh depth-of-view, color grading and lens flares associated with multiple lighting.[43] The terrain system in REDengine 3 uses tessellation and layers varying material, which can then be easily blended.[43]

Cyberpunk 2077 will use REDengine 4, the next iteration of the REDengine.[50] It introduces support for ray-traced global illumination and other effects, and this technique will be available in Cyberpunk 2077.[51]

In 2008, the company introduced Good Old Games, a distribution service with a digital rights management-free strategy.[14] The service aims to help players find "good old games", preserving old games. To do so, the team needed to unravel licensing issues for defunct developers or negotiate with publishers for distribution rights. To recover old code for conversion to modern platforms, they had to use retail versions or second-hand games.[52] CD Projekt partnered with small developers and large publishers, including Activision, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, to broaden the service's portfolio of games to triple-A and independent video games.[53]

Despite suspicions that it was a "doomed project", according to managing director Guillaume Rambourg, it has expanded since its introduction.[54] Indeed, as of June 2015, GOG.com had seen 690,000 units[55] of CD Projekt Red's game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt redeemed through the service, more than the second largest digital seller Steam (approx. 580,000 units[56]) and all other PC digital distribution services combined.[57] As of July 8, 2019, every third Cyberpunk 2077 digital pre-order was sold on GOG.com.[58] Income from GOG.com (known internally as CD Projekt Blue) accrues to CD Projekt Red.[12]