RPS: This is the second time you’ve chosen to adapt a setting with a heavy literary background. And it seems like, a lot of the time, books tend to lend themselves to games better than, say, TV shows or movies.

Iwinski: [chuckles] Game of Thrones.

But yeah, when I started the company in 1994 with a friend, we first got a lot of experience on the business side of things. So we were looking at a lot of games for distribution and working with a lot of people, and what sank a lot of creations was that the world, setting, and idea were shallow. Incomplete. And if you look at The Witcher, the author spent 16 years writing it. That’s an amazing foundation. So let’s say you’re working on a game, and it’s a four-year development cycle. So you’re spending, what, a year creating the world? What’s that compared to a book by someone like George R.R. Martin? So you have a very profound, deep thing, and it’s much easier to build a game around it. Movies don’t have that.

RPS: Is there any interest at CD Projekt in breaking out of that cycle and creating wholly unique worlds – removed from someone else’s license?

Iwinski: We definitely want to do things right. So obviously, we’re not abandoning The Witcher. We’re not talking about what’s next right now, but you can guess it’ll be happening sometime in the future. And then there’s Cyberpunk [occupying our other team]. So, for the foreseeable future, that’s what we’ll be focusing on. And these aren’t just books or – in Cyberpunk’s case – pen-and-paper games. They’re worlds. And they allow us to tell great stories with different kinds of gameplay. And we probably could’ve just stuck with The Witcher, but it’s a new setting. So it’s great for our developers who wanted to try different things. Because, for some, it’s like “How many more years will I be working on swords?” So now they can work on great guns or implants. I think that’s a good balance for us.

I’m not saying “no” [to the idea of a wholly original IP], but we’ll take probably a long time to come up with a system.​