CD Projekt RED CEO: 2015 and 2016 Are ‘The Years of The Witcher’

CD Projekt RED, developer of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, intends to focus on the latest entry in their successful fantasy franchise through next year, according to a Reuters interview with CD Projekt RED CEO Adam Kicinski.

"We hope and we are certain that Cyberpunk has even bigger commercial potential," Kicinski said. "It is too early to talk about it, though. This year and the next one will be the years of The Witcher."

The developer’s plans for The Witcher 3 already include 16 free pieces of downloadable content, four of which have already been released, and two expansions.

Pre-orders indicated to CD Projekt RED that The Witcher 3 would sell 1.5 million copies. Kicinski takes the pre-order-based forecast as a sign of the franchise’s highest sales yet.

"Sales of [The Witcher 3] will be many times higher than with our earlier games," he said." Preorders indicate this."

The Witcher and The Witcher 2 sold 1 million and 1.7 million copies, respectively, in their lifetime.

Reuters reported via a DM BO Brokerage analyst that The Witcher 3 is expected to sell 7 million copies by year’s end.

While a solid number is yet to be revealed, The Witcher 3 managed to top sales charts, being cited as the best-selling game of the year so far.

Following its May 19 release, The Witcher 3 was faced with some scrutiny on the PC version, concerning differences in stability between players using AMD or Nvidia graphics cards. Since then, a patch was released for the PC version that brought stability fixes to users using the Hairworks technology on an Nvidia 9XX series graphics card, among other updates. It was unclear if this update to Hairworks had any effect on those using an AMD GPU.