DRM free games don't mean anything if you don't make games anyone wants. Steam became a success because they had a game large sections of the gaming public consistently want (counterstrike/Half life) and can get new games people actually want to play.

I've seen in the gaming news of your mis-steps with lawyers and piracy

http://kotaku.com/5875574/cd-projekt-retires-its-witcher-2-piracy-witch+hunt

The problem never was piracy, the problem is game quality and having games people actually want to play. This rule is hardest for developers and publishers to learn but as gamers when I was a kid I rented most games and only bought *my favorites* the rest of the videogames got left on the shelf.

I took a look at Witcher 1 + 2 and I'm not really big on the games you've made, they aren't 'must have titles' and they all suffer from "cinematic game disease" that infests AAA games these days.

If you want people to take notice of you, you have to make properties that are popular and focus on gameplay instead of interactive movies. I'm not a fan of modern RPG's and many old school PC RPG's had horrible passive combat models (baldurs gate, nwn) compared to older PC and older console RPG's. If an RPG has a horrible combat model I simply pass over the game, I'm there for the combat most of the time and story while nice is not the meat and potatoes for me. Even the acclaimed planescape torment bombed financially because - it wasn't really a very FUN GAME, it was an interactive novel wrapped in the infinity engine. I enjoyed it for what it was but that's because I was already a nerdy D&D fan... but wrapping a novel in a game only appeals to a certain kind of person.

If you're just going to be content like other gamedevs just mindlessly aping trends instead of focusing on gameplay quality you're doing all gamers a disservice, story and cinematics is not gameplay, I can't say this enough. Most older PC RPG's had bad gameplay as well. Mass effect 2 and 3 work because even though they are chock full of cinematics you actually are a participant in the game world and the action is good. Most modern RPG's have poor/dull combat, that's part of the reason why we're seeing the rise of 'fps/rpg' hybrids like fallout and mass effect. Because the combat in many older rpg's was about as boring as watching paint dry.

Any game in which combat is highly automated and the gamer is inactive not involved is in fact more of a movie then a game, and most PC RPG's of the past and modern ones are passive watch fests. I feel many people at CD projekt can't get outside of their heads and grasp what makes a game fun to play.

A good strategy would be to make quality games of a known mechanic that is popular build up a warchest then do the games you want to make like the witcher, if you're big on passive automated combat cinematic rpg's. But the games industry is ultimately about serving gamers with games that have the widest audience and builds consistent revenue, not your own.

A lot of game development nerds from the 80's and 90's went of out business or got bought by publishers because the couldn't get out of their heads and made what they wanted to make instead of asking 'what makes this game fun TO PLAY'.

This even happens in established genres where the developers don't know what they did wrong, Descent 3 for instance for me was the worst descent in the series and it's pretty much what killed it IMHO. They didn't understand what made their previous two games interesting.
The levels were too big and too poorly paced and the story/feeling of the universe was just downright awful. I thought 'flying outside' was a bad idea because much of the fun and pacing of the game game from limiting the players movement and doing battle in confined spaces.

Most modern games today lack replayability, they are one-off cinematic affairs that try to wow the player with story and emotion but once it's over there's no real need to replay the game. Now these kinds of games have their place for those who can pull them off but they have no lasting value to many traditional gamers who play games for GAME PLAY not to watch computer rendered movies on their computers.

Your difficulty in attracting gamers is your inability to expand your horizons and make a game that lots and lots of people want. The reason why EA can push things like origin is because it has battlefield and mass effect and lots of other key games that large numbers of gamers can't get enough of. If you just make 'the games you want to' instead of doing your time in the trenches to build up an audience that's big enough to support you steam and others will continue to clobber you.

I laud that you want gamers to buy DRM free games and I hate DRM too but you can't expand on old games.

If you'd buy the rights to defunct cherished older games and remake them at modern AAA standards that would go a long way to renewing interest in older games IMHO.

Many games of the past were released at the wrong time with only limited exposure to gamers. I look at games like mass effect and wonder what bioware could do with a property like freespace today. Freepsace devs had an interesting universe but they chained it to joystick ww2 dogfighting combat that only a minority of gamers have the dexterity to play. Now there is a place for this kind of game and I love freespace dearly but I know the business reality of modern gamers tastes for first person games.

Build properties people want to love but don't forget the gameplay, too many games are just movies with the most barest and basic of interactivity that holds no interest for those of us who've been gaming since the 80's and watched gamings slide into DRM and DLC scam hell.

I prefer the second over the first, though. But both are awesome :)

Thats because you came for the cinematic aspects, the combat in Witcher 1 was a passive simplistic affair. I had to drag myself through Witcher 1.

If you want more challenging combat ... combat in TW2 is certainly anything but passive ... also RPGs are supposed to be more story-driven :)

Seriously though TW1 and TW2 are both very successful games. CDPR is making games people want to buy and want to buy beyond no-DRM policies. GOG is also doing extremely well - especially considering the niche audience it caters to, but even beyond that has grown tremendously in 3+ years.

Sure I'd love for someone professional to take up Freespace, but the Freespace open source people are doing a pretty damn good job, and CDPR or BioWare would be the wrong companies to do that - they aren't space combat companies. That would represent a huge departure of gaming expertise. I'm not saying it couldn't be done and that they would necessarily be bad at that, but they are both RPG companies. That's their expertise and focus.

While I agree that the combat in The Witcher was the games weakest part, I found that game to be considerably better than most AAA games released ever. The story was interesting and it had characters that made me care. In fact, The Witcher put CDprojekt on many gamers radar, and if I only had a better computer, I would have bought The Witcher 2 on launch.

GOG does not actually buy the rights to these games, they just get the rights to sell them, much like Steam does. Basically GOG is just a distribution platform (although the GOG team does some tweaking to older games in order to make them work), like Steam, and the GOG team don't have the rights to do major changes to any of the games that they release here.

And we are actually seeing a bit of a return to the whole "developers make what they want to play, not what they expect to sell the most" these days, probably as a response to how the market was getting more and more homogeneous. Indie games (large and small) delivers the experience that the big publishers wont, and many are making a lot of money from it. The Witcher also seem to have managed to do the same thing, they found a niche that was not as over-exploited by the big boys, and it worked out really well. Another example of a company that operates like this is Paradox, they release complex grand strategy, that don't have a mass appeal, but as the games target a niche that is not over-saturated, Paradox has been able to grow quite a lot. Paradox's CEO made a comment about trying to go head to head with the large publishers, and compete in their field, is a very bad idea, because they simply can't release a game that will be able to compete with the ones that EA make, they don't have the resources to develop games with Battlefield 3-like graphics, nor can they spend as much on marketing.


And my post became a bit "rambly", but my points were: The Witcher targeted a more niche market, and sold well because of it. Paradox has done the same thing, and they do very well because of it. GOG don't have the right to make major changes to the games, it is just a distribution platform, one that again targeted a niche market, which meant that they did not have to compete directly with the likes of Steam & Gamer's Gate.

Your argument is full of contradictions and ultimately boils down to "I wish you did things differently" and "what I want is what most people want, even though they don't".

Sure any company can make any type of game ... and who knows? Either of the companies might make a great non-RPG game, but I imagine a space sim would be out of the comfort zone for either company. Developing out of a comfort zone usually leads to one of two things: 1) a disaster made by people who don't understand the genre ... or 2) something remarkable precisely because they bring something new to the table. :)

Ad hominem, empty hyperbole and inaccurate statements.

You're new to GOG and you also seem to be new to the internet too.

It's not just 'challenging combat' is the fact that dungeon crawling has been thrown out and replaced by story. Story is a passive affair. IF you look at the earliest rpg's dungeon crawling/combat was a mainstay before graphics allowed story to take over for the casual audience. I'll take an old game like final fantasy 1 with it's random combat over a game like final fantasy 12 any day of the week. At least I get to play the game instead of watch my auto-combat bot play the game for me.

I don't think your arguments hold much water precisely because TW1 and now especially TW2 have been very successful games. You may not like them, though it doesn't sound like you've actually played TW2, but there you are. RPGs are the second biggest genre right now after FPS - by your logic, to attract gamers, CDPR should be doing exactly what its doing or move to the over-saturated shooter market since those are the biggest and most popular sellers.

I don't think you like CRPGs ... that's fine, I'm not huge on the genre myself, but lets not pretend that isn't what gamers want to play ...

But not as successful as they want them to be, you can see the frustration when they went on a pirate chase with witcher too because they didn't think 'it sold as much as it could have'. They want that big mass market success but they aren't going to find it with games like witcher, i.e. they are not satisfied and thats why you see they are schizophrenic.

You're biased because you like witcher but you're not paying attention to their behavior as a company. They want to grow and it's obvious they are not satisfied with the lower sales # of witcher series compared to other games and hence you get that piracy reaction.

And them complaining about game sales.

I am not particularly enamored with TW2 - I like it a lot, don't get me wrong - but as I said I'm not a big RPG player and it isn't my typical genre of interest.

They've never complained about game sales and they said they would go after pirates in the manner they did before the game was released. It was not in response to bad sales. In fact, quite the opposite, they've consistently noted they've had great sales and that piracy rates on TW2 were lower than any other game. The fact that they still went after pirates is because they believed that punishing customers with DRM is the wrong thing to do, but that they should still go after pirates when possible. The manner in which they did so upset a lot of people and so they stopped.

The games are selling great - 1 million copies are something ridiculous which for a studios' second major (total?) release is fantastic. Heck the Xbox version has gone gold or platinum or whatever they call it on pre-orders alone. CDPR is growing just fine ...

Most of what they say publically and how they behave are at odds. They are just doing public relations. There is obviously internal division behind the scenes or they wouldn't make boneheaded statements about game sales and have those piracy reactions.

They had those piracy reactions LONG AFTER they should have accepted that piracy is a fact of life. You can't get rid of it. Computers copy information that is a fundamental reality and you either adjust to that reality or you're just in denial and being foolish.