Following CD Projekt RED’s recent quarterly report, where we learned that The Witcher 4 (Polaris) is still in pre-production, a couple of executives were invited by the Polish financial site StockWatch to answer a few questions.
First and foremost, CD Projekt RED Chief Financial Officer Piotr Nielubowicz said microtransactions will not be added to the future single player games made by the studio, though multiplayer titles may introduce them.
We do not see a place for microtransactions in the case of single-player games, but we do not rule out that we will use this solution in the future in the case of multiplayer projects.
This is particularly relevant given that more and more single player games feature optional microtransactions. CAPCOM’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 recently received a lot of criticism for that (and the suboptimal performance).
After many years of having an excellent relationship with its fans, CD Projekt RED slipped with the original release of Cyberpunk 2077, which was especially troublesome on consoles and led Sony to the nearly unprecedented decision to temporarily remove the game from its store. The Polish developer worked hard to restore its reputation with the well-received Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty expansion, so it would have been weird for them to adopt a different stance on this topic, primarily since they’ve always been known for fair monetization of DLCs and the like.
Nielubowicz also talked briefly about the remake of the first The Witcher game, in development at Fool’s Theory:
We are at the early stage of conceptual work. Yes – our assumption is that the remake will use solutions developed as part of the Polaris project.
During the Q&A, CD Projekt RED’s Karolina Gnaś, Vice President for Investor Relations, touched upon the rebooted The Witcher spinoff in development at Molasses Flood:
We continue to work on the project and we are more and more satisfied with the results. Currently, less than 40 people are involved in Sirius, we do not want to reveal the target number at this stage of work.
On this project, Nielubowicz added that Sirius is being treated as a triple-A project with a ‘slightly wider’ target group than The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. Additionally, the game will include cooperative multiplayer elements. As such, Sirius could be one CD Projekt RED game with some form of microtransactions.
