Interview with the CD Projekt's founder ("Pirates are underserved customers")

[Nalano]

(Let's stop calling them RPGs for historical reasons, shall we ?)

Yes, Wizardry does indeed belong in the dustbin of history.

[b0rsuk]

Role Playing games. You play a role of witcher named Geralt. Adventure and story are necessary part of role playing. so you can call them story based adventure roleplay games. if you must.

In Call of Duty, you play the role of some soldier, and there's a story, and everyone talks to you like you're someone extremely important. You're a soldier the world revolves around.

Role playing is often done without adventure. At stage. And it's not uncommon for LARPs to not have any travelling.

"Adventure" describes the genre much better than "RPG". "RPG" games where you don't travel around the world, explore and slay some enemies are unheard of. The action never takes place in one spot, one city. I know what you're going to say - Baldur's Gate I, II, Planescape: Torment. WRONG. These games may technically take place in cities, but the mechanic is the same - you gain access to new areas and explore them. Once you visit an area, you rarely look back. New things come from new areas, not from events like a caravan arriving to the city.

Nowadays mechanics which come from pen&paper RPG games are found in pretty much all genres. Experience levels, character skill advancement are extremely common in FPS games, RTS, turn-based strategy, platformers. I'm pretty sure most modern games have explicit character development or at least skill trees.

I fail to understand your logic. Sapkowski had not contributed anything towards production of games. He only lent his name and rights to the world he created years ago for CDP to do as they please. Therefore I don't see how Sapkowski not having written anything of note (i did like his short stories tough.) has any impact on CDP lasting or not. There are millions of other worlds they can use like Cyberpunk.

Sapkowski didn't have to actively take part. He created a fairly consistent setting and characters. It's pretty good for a book, and awesome for a game. What I mean is that once they milk the world and characters, they may be left with no setting except their something they write in-house, and that would probably be as good as 95% of video game stories. As for cyberpunk, Hard Reset was a cyberpunk game by a polish developer. It had a story. It was a steaming pile of crap.
It's not so much that no more stories can be written to fit Sapkowski's world. But there's danger of sequelitis and gamers growing bored. I don't know about you but I get sick when I read the same books over and over. For this reason I stopped reading Terry Pratchett somewhere past 20th book.

Unless of course they fuck up big time or the genre becomes unprofitable and they won't be able to switch.

Then need new formulas to be sustainable. Bioware's games are getting stale, don't you agree ?

----------------------

As for pirates, they exist because they're able to provide better service. Beating pirates into submission is playing whack-a-mole. It's better to remove reasons software piracy is attractive.

[Nalano]

Blah blah blah WRONG. Blah blah blah

Just... stop.

Seriously.

[CuriousOrange]

This isn't the place for yet another argument about what the term RPG means. More importantly though, who cares?

[NathanH]

The Witcher and The Witcher 2 are choice'n'consequence action-RPGs. End of argument.

[alms]

Before we buy into his beautiful words about belief in honesty of gamers, let's not forget that twice CD Projekt sought legal actions against alleged pirate downloaders:

I think this guy will say whatever he thinks will buy affection from his audience - like a true salesman. Today being progressive about piracy is hip, tomorrow cyan will be the new white/black/whatever, new buzzwords will pop up and you can be sure he'll like cyan a lot and drop all the right buzzwords exactly the same way he's saying F2P FTW in that article.

[NathanH]

I think this guy will say whatever he thinks will buy affection from his audience - like a true salesman

Absolutely. If I were in his place I would say exactly the same thing, regardless of whether I believed pirates are underserved customers or scrounging filth.

[alms]

If I were in his place I would say exactly the same thing

Is this the part where we all pretend being lying assholes is like totally OK, because you know? it's the spirit of Capitalism.

[NathanH]

Is this the part where we all pretend being lying assholes is like totally OK, because you know? it's the spirit of Capitalism.

I wouldn't really call it being an asshole, it's just a sensible response to the certainty that anything you say is going to be misinterpreted, misunderstood, dismissed without thought, not given a fair hearing, twisted by people with an agenda to push, and so on. It's probably more of a consequence of mass communication rather than capitalism, I'd imagine.

[Finicky]

But let us do what we know. Don't try to spread ourselves too thin.

thank god.


Also this guy gets it.

A pirate like me (though I do buy a decent amount of games, but they have to hold up to high standards) bought witcher 2 because CDPR didn't insult me with shoving shitty dlc in my face or hyping up a story written by a preschooler or with the whole WOE IS US, 700 people on our credit screen game development is so expensive waaaa pathetic pity party that does the rounds in gaming pr these days.

I didn't pirate it, granted I only paid 20 euros for it because they released it in a bugged state.
Had they actually finished bugtesting before releasing I wouldn't have had to wait, and it wouldn't have been 20 euros by then.

I've been a pirating gamer since the early 90s, yet probably easily 20 thousand euros on games and gaming hardware in that time.
As publishers keep pushing insulting value propositions and wasting their budget on marketing instead of gameplay the list of games I deem worth buying shrinks every year.

My money is still there though, none of them seem interested in earning it.

The unserved customer pun berzee made works just as well, pirated games are plenty often just undeserved sales.
I'd feel dirty if I ever paid for an EA published game (used to buy loads of their releases in the nfs2 era and up to when 'ea it's in the game' logo for a new IP was usually a mark of quality, now it is a mark of shame)

As long as CDPR keep making good games and not insult their fans they will keep doing well for themselves, and they won't need 100 million dollar budgets or huge risks or 300 man teams to peddle their wares like the big inefficient incompetent bloated devs and publishers do.

Really don't care if they want to make a witcher for a console or a shitty ipad, as long as it doesn't have any effect on the gameplay/design of any game they make on pc, which this guy seems to understand.

[alms]

It's probably more of a consequence of mass communication rather than capitalism, I'd imagine.

Don't think so, paying lip service came much earlier than mass communication.

[NathanH]

Don't think so, paying lip service came much earlier than mass communication.

Of course, but these days it is the only option.

[alms]

Of course, but these days it is the only option.

"They made me do it!"

[Nalano]

I wouldn't really call it being an asshole, it's just a sensible response to the certainty that anything you say is going to be misinterpreted, misunderstood, dismissed without thought, not given a fair hearing, twisted by people with an agenda to push, and so on. It's probably more of a consequence of mass communication rather than capitalism, I'd imagine.

The flipside to that is everything you hear about anything is a lie or as close to a lie as legally possible. They may have to hire legions of lawyers to figure out which letter combinations equal something nasty in Lithuanian but every word they print is at best overstating their case and at worst an absolute fabrication designed specifically to fuck you. These are not arbiters of truth - not even the press gets the truth - they're people out looking for a buck, and even as a moral man I for one know the lengths I've gone for a buck.

That said, you have to give CDProjekt credit for their relative savvy. Even to lie effectively you have to on some level get it.

[soldant]

How so? Gabe uses the same reasoning. You can't beat pirates. You can win their wallets with better product. drm is not the answer.

Exactly, the war on piracy is a futile one, much like the war on drugs (except piracy probably isn't going to kill anyone through a cocaine-induced MI or something). They're never going to be able to stop it, dragging people to court or tossing out these extortion/blackmail emails won't do anything to stem the flow.

As someone else said GabeN and Valve have proven that it's possible to have a reasonably non-intrusive form of DRM (Steam) and encourage people to buy their product. I don't know many people who have pirated a Valve game since Steam stopped being so crap, namely due to the fair pricing, and this is going back to 2006/2007 (some friends pirated HL2 because Steam was absolutely terrible so that they could play it, but even then they'd already bought it). Meanwhile, the publishers who keep pricing their digital downloads at obscene prices to prop up the dying retail sector are victims, and will remain so until they change.

Even then there's always going to be a certain percentage of gamers who will pirate no matter what, and you'll never fix that. Reminds me of how Cliffski made a big show of engaging with pirates to ask why they ripped off his games, then promptly threw a fit when piracy didn't stop overnight.

[Lukasz]

Sapkowski didn't have to actively take part. He created a fairly consistent setting and characters. It's pretty good for a book, and awesome for a game. What I mean is that once they milk the world and characters, they may be left with no setting except their something they write in-house, and that would probably be as good as 95% of video game stories. As for cyberpunk, Hard Reset was a cyberpunk game by a polish developer. It had a story. It was a steaming pile of crap.
It's not so much that no more stories can be written to fit Sapkowski's world. But there's danger of sequelitis and gamers growing bored. I don't know about you but I get sick when I read the same books over and over. For this reason I stopped reading Terry Pratchett somewhere past 20th book.

don't get your reasoning.

you are basically saying that they can only make Witcher games. Why would you say that?

First thing first:
They just made 2 games. So we are good till 2020 for the setting to become stale.
Second thing is your mention of Hard Reset: You seem to imply that Polish people cannot write cyberpunk story because HR story sucked. That kind of reasoning is quiet racists (nationists?) You are saying that because a bunch of people from one group could not do something good it means that the whole group and every member of that group cannot do that either.
Not to mention that story was not the focus of HR.
Thirdly: There is many more settings they can use. That is the most confusing part of your post. Why can't use other great authors? Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, French, German.... hundreds of amazings worlds to use... many of them unheard in English speaking world. because sapkowski didn't do anything worthwhile except Witcher it has no affect on CDP at all.

[Mohorovicic]

How so? Gabe uses the same reasoning. You can't beat pirates. You can win their wallets with better product. drm is not the answer.

You can't beat pirates, but you can't win most of them with a good product. At the end of the day, they can get a game for free or for $60. For someone who doesn't give a single fuck about morality/econimics aspect of piracy, there is really no choice. Why pay when you can have same thing for free? It's that simple. Quality of the game doesn't even come into equation.

What, don't tell me you believe in the supposed masses who refuse to buy games because EA, or intrusive DRM? Those are a minority, they're just a very loud one. Think back to the "Boycott Modern Warfare 2" Steam group...

And Gabe as an example, really? The man who practically invented online DRM for offline games?

[soldant]

Why pay when you can have same thing for free? It's that simple. Quality of the game doesn't even come into equation.

While I agree that there will always be people that take that path (and way more than most pirates would like to admit) there are plenty of games where purchasing has been well worth the time and effort, like with Minecraft or Skyrim, and Valve's games have managed to thrive in an era of piracy.

That said the argument about games piracy doesn't often hold up as much as for media piracy (e.g. TV shows) when it comes to access.

[Mohorovicic]

How is purchasing Minecraft and Skyrim well worth time and effort? Minecraft - server dependent, there's plenty of ones that let people with pirated versions in. Skyrim - I am drawing a complete blank, what did it ever do for paying customers?

[venn177]

Absolutely. If I were in his place I would say exactly the same thing, regardless of whether I believed pirates are underserved customers or scrounging filth.

While it's true that this is the logical PR move to make, everything he says is backed up by CD Projekt's practices, so there's got to be a seed of true to it, at the least.