‘Cyberpunk 2077’ And ‘The Witcher’ Dev CD Projekt Red Bucks Industry Greed, Says “We See No Room For Microtransactions For Single Player Games”
Spencer Baculi
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In proving that, even through all their various missteps, the Polish video game developer is one of the last that actually still cares about players, CD Projekt Red has declared that as far as they’re concerned, there is “no room for micotransactions” in any of their future single-player projects.
The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 studio’s refreshing deference to delivering customers a satisfactory single-player experience over nickel-and-diming them to death was first made public courtesy of CD Projekt Red’s Chief Financial Officer, Piotr Nielubowicz.
Fielding questions from investors on March 29th following the studio’s FY 2023 financial report, as facilitated by Poland-based investment website StockWatch.Pl (as machine translated by DeepL), Nielubowicz was at one point pressed by an individual, themselves identified only as ‘Emil’, as to the studio’s future business plans.
To this end, Emil eventually inquired as to whether or not “microtransactions [will] be added to future games”, to which Nielubowicz directly affirmed, “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.”
At current, CD Projekt Red is working on five titles:
- The next proper The Witcher entry, currently codenamed ‘Polaris’
- A sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, currently codenamed ‘Orion’
- A brand new IP, currently codenamed ‘Hadar’
- A multiplayer The Witcher spin-off game, its development being helmed primarily by The Flame in the Flood developer The Molasses Flood, currently codenamed ‘Sirius’
- And a remake of the first The Witcher title, as currently being handled by Seven: The Days Long Gone developer Fool’s Theory
As such, given Nielubowicz’s above declaration that only their multiplayer titles will feature microtransactions, The Molasses Flood’s ‘Sirius’ project is the only one which can currently be confirmed to eventually fall under this category.
However, as both ‘Orion’, ‘Polaris’, and ‘Hadar’ are currently still in early development – ‘Polaris’ is the furthest along by far, and even then it’s only at the pre-production stage – as of writing, there remains a distinct possibility that these titles may end up featuring a multiplayer element, and thus microtransaction offerings all their own.
As noted above, Nielubowicz – and CD Projekt Red as a whole’s – outlook towards excluding microtransactions from single player experiences comes as a welcome breath of fresh air amidst an era where it has become industry standard for developers to try and milk one’s players for every last scent they possibly can.
Take, for example, the recent debacle around Capcom’s decision to include an egregious cash-shop in the recent Dragon’s Dogma 2, offering players the chance to buy items to improve their characters in an exclusively single-player game.
Or, if one wants to go to a true extreme, look at anything Blizzard has done with Diablo or Overwatch/2 over the past few years – $65 USD for a mount?! Talk about highway robbery.
Suffice to say, should CD Projekt Red be able to hold through on their promise, they’ll continue to earn goodwill among players – and in this day and age, that’s more valuable than any payout from a microtransaction.
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