Turns out The Witcher 3 was quite the financial success for CD Projekt Red. That in itself is no real surprise, but the impact the game had on the studio’s revenues, announced in their latest financial report, is pretty striking.
It’s been ten years since CD Projekt Red released The Witcher, and they have a lovely video to celebrate.
Before the release of The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red’s highest quarterly revenue amounted to around 50 million Polish zloty, or around £10 million. That coincided with the release of The Witcher 2 on PC, back in 2011. After that, the next high point was the Xbox 360 release of the game, but for the most part, quarterly revenues hovered around the 10-20 million zloty mark.
CD Projekt Red – Quarterly revenues from 2011 to 2017. pic.twitter.com/lWja8dvab6
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) September 6, 2017
That is, until the second quarter of 2015. After The Witcher 3 launched in May of that year, the developer’s revenues jumped to more than 450 million zloty (just shy of £100 million). While sales have obviously dipped since then, they remain far above where they used to be, helpfully bolstered by the release of The Witcher 3’s two expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.
What remains to be seen now is whether the studio’s next two games can live up to the expectations of the final Witcher game. Gwent, the standalone card game set in the world of the Witcher series is one of those upcoming projects, but it faces some stiff competition in the CCG genre, and its team don’t expect it to challenge Hearthstone for the top spot. If anything was going to challenge The Witcher 3’s financial success, it would probably be Cyberpunk 2077, which CD Projekt announced back in 2012.