Gaph on 1/11/2008 at 17:00
Quote Posted by Koki
Well, the lesson all devs learned from this is making a game for a specific audience means it sells a measly 1m copies.
The Witcher goes for about $40, cost 11m to make and they sold a million copies, so they should have made their money back several times over. Similarly Sins of a Solar Empire only sold 500,000 copies but only cost 1m to make. Either way the return on investment is substantial. And both games were far away from mainstream.
nicked on 1/11/2008 at 17:01
1 million x ~£20-£30 a copy = a lot more than $11 million - how is that not a success?
CocoClown on 1/11/2008 at 18:49
Though a decent-sized chunk of that £20-30 will probably go to the middle-men (Play, Amazon etc), I think it's probably fairly likely that The Witcher covered its costs and made a profit on top of that.
And it's still going to continue to sell. These word-of-mouth games tend to be slow-burners, as opposed to the "Opening Weekend" style sales that a high-profile game like GTA would attract (whereby a greater proportion of their sales will be when the game is released).
All in all, good news for us PC gamers! Not bad for a dead platform.
Zygoptera on 1/11/2008 at 21:56
Koki's from Poland, IIRC, and it was heavily advertised there (TV, radio etc.) as that is where Andrei S and CDPR come from, but is wasn't heavily advertised anywhere else.
If you want a (rough) estimate of how much money it's made, given an average price of 40USD each would make roughly $20 for the distributor and developer. Because Atari was pretty much only a distributor, and the only publisher type thing they did was the VO, they would have got a lot less proportionally. Net result? Probably about 4-5 million USD profit for CDPR. And considering they will almost certainly require less lead in and development for the sequel than the original (which took around five years, including the EE, expect the sequel to take maybe two) it may well already be enough to fund the second title entirely. Which is an excellent situation to be in.
mothra on 2/11/2008 at 01:42
the witcher sold 200.000 in poland, more than cod4 and gears of war combined i think. most interesting thing is still the trailer with new shirtless witcher action :)
Kroakie on 2/11/2008 at 03:56
Mmmm... shirtless Geralt...
What?
redrain85 on 3/11/2008 at 03:10
Can't say I'm a fan of this type of game. Nevertheless, I'm glad to hear that The Witcher is a success.
And since when was selling 1 million copies "measly"? It's only in today's insanely greedy industry, that 1 million is somehow considered less than successful. Meanwhile, a lot of games still don't sell more than about 2 million, yet are considered "blockbusters" (Bioshock). Go figure. :rolleyes:
If you take into account all the factors: the game's limited appeal, being published on only one platform, didn't cost that much to make, came from a relatively unheard of studio, and had virtually no marketing outside of Poland . . . I'd say they did damn good sales.
And their sales will undoubtedly continue to climb, as news about this game continues to circulate and more people become aware of its existence. Also, word of mouth about CD-Projekt's copy protection policy and Good Old Games service won't hurt.
mothra on 3/11/2008 at 12:50
i can't see anything bad about 1 mio either. it's all in your business plan. if you NEED to reach 1mio. to break even I would say 1 year is a failure but as I understood it they never had this as a business goal, just more like a dream. and they made it happen, so it's certainly a success.
and I must say that after playing some "blockbusters" since then, theWitcher still keeps me interested. even with all the different variations in the story found out after 4 replays I can still revisit it and have fun with the minigames (drinking/gambling) AND the combat alone. and the design/music is still one of the best I came across in a long time. I don't care that the engine is dated and maps are small and restricted. the story is more openended and diverse FarCry2 ever was with its copy/paste 50km map.
it's just one of those games that felt boring to begin with (although interesting) and then it clicked, everything fell into place and no flaw whatsoever can hamper my love for this game.
I hope they can keep this quality for their next release and don't get sidetracked by spending too much money on bling instead of investing time on story/design.
demagogue on 3/11/2008 at 17:23
Quote Posted by LittleFlower
It's madness. ... A game is released, a huge audience buys it, and after 2 months, nobody cares anymore.
That reminds me of a commercial I just HATE.
It starts in a Doom like FPS where the marine PC is gunning down demons, and finally he stops and says to the demons, "You know what, I'm kind of bored of you guys. I think I'm going to sell you off at a bargain bin."
And one of the demons looks at him all teary-eyed and says, "After all we've been through, all those hours of gaming. Just think about how much we are worth to you."
And the guy says "About $8.50!" with that awful stupid smile on his face.
It summed up everything wrong with how games are being made these days.
Not even the people buying them care about them for long, except in their re-sale value. :nono:
On topic: That's good news about the Witcher. I'm surprised ... I don't know what separates it from a lot of other awesome niche games that never sell well, but whatever it is I hope people were taking notes.
