August 30, 2019 CDPR has revealed that The Witcher 3 has sold more copies in the first half of 2019 than in the same period last year.
Earlier this year CD Projekt Red’s 2015 fantasy RPG The Witcher 3 hit a pretty huge milestone, having sold over 20 million copies as of June – and it looks like the sales just keep coming. The studio has just revealed that the Witcher 3 has sold more copies in the first half of 2019 than it did in the same period last year.
In a post on CDPR’s website (via PCGamer), the studio reflects on how it’s fared in the first half of 2019, and it looks like it’s had a strong start to the year. While upcoming dystopian RPG Cyberpunk 2077, which has seen quite a lot of pre-order sales already, is in the works, it appears that now four-year-old The Witcher 3 has been the biggest player in the studio’s financial results in the period.
CFO and vice president Piotr Nielubowicz says in the post “our financial result for the first half of the year was again mainly affected by sales of The Witcher 3, which remain strong. This further confirms our belief that investing in top-quality games pays off, and that such games may continue to sell well for many years” adding that “in the first half of 2019 gamers actually purchased more copies of The Witcher 3 than during the first half of the previous year!”
With the game heading to the Nintendo Switch later this year, perhaps we’ll see Geralt keep the sales coming for CDPR into the second half of 2019 and beyond.
Earlier this year CD Projekt Red revealed that its Witcher series of games has sold over 40 million copies overall. The dev credited The Witcher 3 as contributing half of that total – so we can roughly say that the fantasy RPG has sold over 20 million copies, though we can’t say for sure exactly how many of those were PC sales.
Though it hasn’t looked likely that a Witcher 4 release will be on the way any time soon, CDPR also reveals in a management board report that it’ll be moving forward with a dual-franchise model, managing the Cyberpunk and Witcher series simultaneously.
Talking about “migration towards a dual-franchise model”, the report reads “managing two separate major franchises (The Witcher and Cyberpunk), along with several independent development teams, enables the company to conduct parallel work on several projects and smoothens its long-term release schedule.”