CD Projekt

CD Projekt

CD Projekt S. A. is a Polish video game developer, publisher and distributor based in Warsaw. The company is best known for The Witcher series. In 2008, it launched the digital distribution service GOG. com. By September 2017, it was the largest publicly traded video game company in Poland, worth about US$2. 3 billion.

About CD Projekt in brief

Summary CD ProjektCD Projekt S. A. is a Polish video game developer, publisher and distributor based in Warsaw. The company is best known for The Witcher series. In 2008, it launched the digital distribution service GOG. com. By September 2017, it was the largest publicly traded video game company in Poland, worth about US$2. 3 billion. By May 2020, it had reached a valuation of US$8. 1 billion, making it the largest video game industry company in Europe ahead of Ubisoft. The firm’s upcoming project is Cyberpunk 2077, an open-world role-playing game based on the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop game system, for which it opened a new division in Wrocław. It joined WIG20, an index of the 20 largest companies on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, in March 2018. It was founded in May 1994 by Marcin Iwiński and Michał KiciŅski, who were video game retailers before they founded the company. They initially acted as a distributor of foreign video games for the domestic market. In 2002, the department responsible for developing original games, CD Projeksi Red, was formed. It released The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in 2011 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 2015, with the latter winning various Game of the Year awards. After the release of The Witcher, the company worked on a console port called The Witcher: White Wolf; but development issues and increasing costs almost led the company to the brink of bankruptcy. It is one of the first in Poland to localize games; according to Iwi ński, most of their products were sold to “mom-and-pop shops” The company opposes DRM in video games, and hopes that free downloadable content becomes an industry standard.

It also works with Interplay Entertainment to translate major video-game releases into Polish, collaborating with two Baldur’s Gate games. Its mission is to offer games free of digital rights management to players and its service was expanded to cover new AAA and independent games. In May 2013, the firm launched a new service to help players find old games. The service, called GOG, was established by CD ProJekt to help users find old video games and to help them find free downloads of new AAA games. It has since been expanded to include independent games such as The Witcher and The Binding of Isaac: New Colossus. The first attempt was successful, with 18,000 units shipped on the game’s release day. They expected the title to become popular in Poland and felt no retailer would be able to translate from English to Polish. Their first successful localization title was Ace Ventura, which sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies. With the success, they approached BioWare and Interplay for the Polish localization of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. The game was cancelled and the company decided to reuse the code for their own video game, which became The Witcher.