Almost 20 years ago (skull emoji), in early 2007, I flew to Poland to visit the developer of a new role-playing game that people in the PC gaming space were getting excited about. The game was The Witcher, and the developer was CD Projekt Red, an offshoot of CD Projekt, a Polish game distribution and localization outfit.
The game didn’t leave a particularly strong impression on me, aside from its striking-looking protagonist. But I admired CD Projekt’s ambition and committed nerdiness, and it was a fun novelty to travel to Warsaw to see a game in development, as opposed to the more typical game industry hubs of the time like Seattle, or Paris, or Guildford. I ate aspic salad and pig’s trotters, and drank very good beer, and wondered how different a game made here — in a country only one generation removed from communist rule — might feel.
It turned out to be different enough to excite players and rouse a slumbering army of traditionalist computer RPG fans, but not so different as to be alienating. Fast-forward to the present day, and CD Projekt is a giant of the establishment, perhaps only one rung down the developer ladder from Rockstar Games, and trailing a growing Polish game industry in its wake. The Witcher 3 has sold more than 60 million copies.
CD Projekt is no outsider now, but it was then. In the mid-2000s, few companies tried to make games of real ambition and scale outside of North America, Western Europe, or Japan, and without the backing of big publishers from those regions. CD Projekt beat a path to the industry’s summit on its own terms, partnering with Bandai Namco on global publishing and distribution but remaining fully independent.
CD Projekt’s is a very rare case, but it’s getting less rare every year. As the gaming establishment struggles to keep up with the costly demands of blockbuster development and releases fewer AAA games each year, the gap is being filled by hungry, well-funded developers from other parts of the world, with dreams of remaking AAA gaming in their own image.
