CD Projekt's joint CEOs, Michał Nowakowski and Adam Badowski, say they used to dream of making the world's greatest RPGs, and while that's still the core of the studio, the pair now has much bigger dreams after the success of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. That includes getting bigger than just games, and apparently Netflix's Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime is just a taste of what they have in mind.
"We once dreamed of becoming the producer of the best RPG games in the world," Nowakowski tells Polish outlet XYZ (via machine translation). "Over time, we realized that this can only be done for a very short time after the game is released." Nowakowski notes that previous success doesn't guarantee that the next game is a hit, and that "continuous work" is necessary to keep fulfilling that dream.
"Today, our ambition is even higher," he continues. "We want to become a global creator of pop culture and entertainment – with games at the center, surrounded by products and events aimed at fans of our productions. It can be anything: a film, a series, an animation, a book, etc. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the anime series we created together with Japanese studio Trigger and which debuted on Netflix over two years ago, is just a foretaste of what we have planned for the coming years."
- The Witcher 3 director says he left CDPR to make his own open-world vampire game because "those rules of RPGs" can be bent and "a smaller team is capable of doing more"
- The Witcher 3 lead says "not many games" were trying to match the RPG back in 2015, and that meant "there was a risk" to making it in the first place
The goal of making great RPGs hasn't gone away, though. "We focus on making games that we like," Badowski adds. "We won't drop everything if, for example, survival games suddenly became popular. We don't intend to change course radically. We wanted to make the best RPG games in the world when we employed a dozen or so people, and we want to pursue the same goal today, with over a thousand employees on board."
Edgerunners alone would prove just how valuable that kind of IP expansion can be, since the anime helped propel Cyberpunk 2077 past some substantial new sales milestones. "With The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 we gained experience in creating an entire entertainment ecosystem around games," Nowakowski says, adding that Edgerunners has created hopes "that in the future, thanks to this type of activities and more frequent premieres, the fluctuation of revenues from sales of our games will be smaller."
There are a whole lot of upcoming CD Projekt Red games on the horizon.
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