The collapse of a gaming empire.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Galaxy Business Bureau” (ID: galaxybiz), Author: boiling point.
Author | Li Xiaonan
Edit | Yang Zhenxin
Bounced tickets three times in a row, the pre-sale sales exceeded 8 million, the cost was recovered on the first day of sale, and a new record for the number of people online at the same time on Steam. Under the spotlight, “Cyberpunk 2077” is undoubtedly the most anticipated in 2020. The most popular game. But after the peak of the debut day, what followed was a sharp drop in its reputation and a decline in the stock price of CDPR, the company behind it.
“It’s too vague, there are many bugs, ordinary graphics cards can’t be used at all, and light chasing (light and shadow tracking system, which can greatly improve the realism of the game screen) are completely two games.” After over 80 hours of players, I would like to say that even if BUG and optimization issues are aside, the content of the game is far from the excellent that it advertised. I’m sorry to expect. It’s just that optimization and BUG are more serious. (This gap ) Forgotten by many people”, commented by two game players at station B. A large amount of evaluation data and user feedback show that “Cyberpunk 2077” on major platforms generally has problems such as poor optimization, blurry pictures, and many game bugs. The problems on PS4 and Xboxone’s two major console platforms of this generation are even more serious: the picture is extremely poor, frequent frame drops and freezes, frequent crashes, and user ratings were once as low as 2.6 points.
On December 14, CDPR officially issued an apology letter and stated that it will continue to release updated patches and optimize the game. On December 18th, Sony launched the “Cyberpunk 2077” purchase page on its PlayStation Store, and announced that all players who bought the digital version of the game in the store can get a refund. From being promoted to the altar before the release, to nowadays it is popular. The dilemma faced by “Cyberpunk 2077” may be answered from its developer CDPR.
01 “Polish Donkey” prequel
Looking back from the node at this moment, the story of CDPR is a bit like “the dragon slaying warrior turns into an evil dragon”.
CDPR is a Polish company. Its founder Marcin Iwinski is a hardcore player who has determined to enter the game industry since he was a child. At that time, the United States and the Soviet Union were in the Cold War period. Affected by this, Poland playedIt’s hard to get access to games from Europe and the United States.
But Marcin was very lucky. He accidentally found the contact information of a Greek netizen in a magazine, and on a whim, he sent a letter and two cassettes to the other party. The main idea of the letter is: these two One of the cassettes contains games and the other is blank. I hope you can print games that are not available in Poland on the blank cassette and send it back to me, and the other will be used as a reward.
Not long after, Marcin received a reply: a cassette with the European and American game “Target: Renegade” printed on it. Marcin, who is not economically wealthy, made a profit by selling the cassette to the market after the game was cleared, and this gave birth to the idea of selling pirated games. At that time, Poland had no laws on copyright protection, which gave the piracy market a chance to rise.
Marchin, who has a keen business sense, started reselling pirated game discs on the market in the capital Warsaw, and got acquainted with Mika Tisinski, who later became a partner of CDPR. In the early 1990s, Poland entered the market economy period. Marcin and Mika, who made the first pot of gold in the piracy market, decided to wash their hands with the golden basin. They founded their company CD Projekt in 1994 and began to buy from American retailers. Genuine games were then sold on the Polish market, and then some businesses were developed to help Polish game developers to localize their games. However, due to the poor environment of the game industry in Poland at that time, CD Projekt’s development was relatively slow. In 1998, CD Projekt saw the development prospects of the classic rpg (role-playing) game “Baldur’s Gate”, and negotiated the agent of “Balder’s Gate” in Poland at a low price from the developer BioWare and publisher Interplay. right.
Marchin, who started with pirated games, knows that in an environment where pirated games cannibalize the genuine market at low prices, the only chance of success for genuine is to provide better services than pirated games. To this end, CD Projekt invested a lot of resources in the localization of “Baldur’s Gate”, not only re-translating the text, but also included their elaborate game guide, parchment map and soundtrack CD in the CD box. . In the end, the market proved that the strategy of using service over low prices is feasible. The price of “Baldur’s Gate” was twice that of the pirated version, but it set an excellent result of nearly 20,000 sets on the first day and 50,000 sets for the year, dozens of times the average market sales. CD Projekt’s first risk bet paid off.
02 The Birth of “The Witcher”
But the following story did not go as smoothly as at the beginning. CD Projekt originally planned to continue cooperating with Interplay to localize Baldur’s Gate 2 and port it to PC for sale. However, after half a year of the project, Interplay faced bankruptcy due to financial problems, and the ongoing porting project was forced to cancel.
Since there is no way between agency and transplantation, then make your own game. CD Projekt, who was ignited with enthusiasm, set out to use the source code of “Baldor’s Gate 2” to develop its own game, and contacted Polish fantasy writer Andrei Sapkowski, intending to transfer his work “The Demon Hunter” “Gamification, because the members of CD Projekt are book fans. At that time, Andre was completely disinterested in this small team, so he rejected the transaction method of dividing the game after the game was released, and sold the game adaptation copyright of “The Demon Hunter” to CD Projekt for $9,500.
In order to develop the first game “The Witcher 1”, CD Projekt established a five-person development team CD Projekt RED. It took a year to make a demo version, but it was considered by all publishing companies to have no future. Declined. After being frustrated, CDPR moved the studio back to its headquarters in Warsaw, and Marcin was personally responsible for a new round of research and development. CDPR later found BioWare, the developer of Baldur’s Gate, and received their great assistance in technical and publicity. The game development team has gradually increased to 100 people.
△”The Witcher 3″
The game industry colleagues at the time were not optimistic about “The Witcher 1” because it could neither choose a career nor connect. It was quite “apostate” in the rpg games at the time, but CDPR quickly proved it with its strength. Innovation is the core competitiveness of game companies.
In October 2007, the classic game “Witcher 1” was released, and the sales have been well received. As of today, the sales volume has reached millions. Four years later, “The Witcher 2:” was officially released. 1.1 million sets were sold in the first year, and it was even given to Obama as a Polish national gift.
In May 2015, “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt”, which received a US$7 million scientific research fund from the Polish government, was developed by the independent engine REDengine, and has a total investment of up to US$8,500, was finally officially released after a series of bounced tickets. “The Witcher 3” is extremely important to the entire world game history and CDPR. It has won more than 800 game industry awards. It sold 6 million sets in the first month of its release. So far, it has sold nearly 30 million sets. It has been CDPR for several years. It can be said that CDPR is able to enter the ranks of the first echelon of international game manufacturers with “The Witcher 3”.
In the following year, CDPR launched 12 free DLCs (downloadable content) for “The Witcher 3” and “Heart of Stone” and “Blood and Wine”.