CDPR Group update - 5 Witcher games, Cyberpunk 2077 sequel and new IP in production.

[Gargaune]

The Peter Principle's corporate cousin strikes again, it seems product quality just can't survive success on the stock market. If that third IP is also AAA material, the strategy reeks of bloat and over-extension. Well, it was nice while it lasted. I'm finally getting some new HDDs, so maybe I'll start backing up my GOG catalogue soon. I'm not anticipating any issues on that front in the near future, but I don't wanna have to bumrush all of it further down the line if some bigger megacorp decides to buy them and swap "DRM free" for "DRM in every orifice."

 

[Dhaze]

"Long-Term Product Outlook"

Do they even realise just how fucking unappealing it is when they're using language like that to communicate about their next game(s)?

 

[ropetight]

The Peter Principle's corporate cousin strikes again, it seems product quality just can't survive success on the stock market. If that third IP is also AAA material, the strategy reeks of bloat and over-extension. Well, it was nice while it lasted. I'm finally getting some new HDDs, so maybe I'll start backing up my GOG catalogue soon. I'm not anticipating any issues on that front in the near future, but I don't wanna have to bumrush all of it further down the line if some bigger megacorp decides to buy them and swap "DRM free" for "DRM in every orifice."

GOG was for long time my absolute favorite game store.
But when you realize they act like Linux doesn't exist, and there is more and more compromise about what DRM-Free is, there is rude awakening to fact that they becoming corporate profit-chasers.
And will probably continue in that direction.

Valve, on the other hand, is using Linux to separate from Microsoft who always lurks on their business.
So they did God's work with Proton, on which 90% Windows games are playable on Linux.
It is not that Valve are suddenly saints, we all know what they did to indie developers couple of years ago, but distinction between them is not big these days.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Quick reminder that CDPR has been singing the tune "We are bigger now and we can work to more projects in parallel" for a while and they ALWAYS ended fucking up things, having to put secondary project in the refrigerator and moving everyone on the main project, usually with months of crunch and shipping late anyway.

I don't believe a single word of this "plan for the next years". I fully expect half of this stuff being merged, cancelled or at best significantly delayed. And at this point I'm not even particularly confident in their ability to deliver consistent quality.
The Witcher 3 was a solid product with its fair share of bafflingly bad design decisions, but somehow CP2077 managed to not address any of its weak points and to add even more issues and terrible design decisions on top.
You know, the good old Ubisoft-style "Who cares what was bad in our previous game? It sold a ton anyway so let's do the same with the next one".

There's also the fact that they've been a fucking revolving door since The Witcher 1, so it's hard to even quantify what their employees are capable of, since they are dropping out of the studio and being replaced at an alarming pace.

 

[gerey]

I miss the days of the /v/irgin oldfags. They would have had a collage listing who among the CDPR old guard was still left around. I seem to recall that many of them quit during the development of Witcher 3, and even more during the development of Cyberpunk 2077.

I also recall CDPR's lofty promises on how they were going to have two teams, one for Witcher and the other for Cyberpunk, delivering games of the same "quality" as Witcher 3 on a consistent basis, and what their initial pitch for Cyberpunk was like, and look at what Cyberpunk 2077 turned into, and what CDPR is like now.

They seem to have deluded themselves into thinking that if they corral enough subhuman women and liberal men and have them slave away in the salt mines they can just bruteforce games out, instead of taking a step back and realizing their whole development pipeline is fucked and the people in charge are complete imbeciles that have no idea what they're doing.

I predict the development of the three new Witcher games will turn into a disaster similar to what Cyberpunk 2077 was - the Pole is not a learning animal, and women and liberals aren't either.

Here's also my predictions for Witcher 4:

• type A and type B body selection
• pronoun selection
• choice of skin color
• same godawful itemization system
• bad combat mechanics
• Witcher 3, but less well-written
• will make the Netflix shitshow seem positively conservative
• still an empty, lifeless open-world

I don't believe a single word of this "plan for the next years". I fully expect half of this stuff being merged, cancelled or at best significantly delayed. And at this point I'm not even particularly confident in their ability to deliver consistent quality.

This reeks of desperation more than anything else. Even though Soyberpunk has seen a resurgence (thanks to the anime, and not anything CDPR did themselves) it hasn't really impacted their stock all that positively, so my guess is that this is their attempt to garner attention by overpromising.

They seem to still be in the "BioWare magic will make it all come together in the end" phase.

 

[ropetight]

"Long-Term Product Outlook"

Do they even realise just how fucking unappealing it is when they're using language like that to communicate about their next game(s)?

Those are the words of big media company with universes, crossovers, spin-offs, events, and all that jazz.
That vision sequence about CP2077 in Witcher 3 is not so innocent anymore.

Hyper production effectively killed most of AAA IPs after extensive milking, so it is not hard to imagine what will happen to Witcher and Cyberpunk.
Attention to detail, creativity and polish will suffer, no more freebies as Director Cuts, more triviality and rushed products...
I hoped CDPR will be smarter than to follow path of EA and bunch, but it seems that much money is inevitable law like gravity.

 

[Daedalos]

I dunno.

I'm hopeful CDPR learned their lesson with the biggest fuckup of CP2077. The expansion SEEMS good, and they certainly revitalized the interest in the game with the patches and expansion and the edgerunner show.. so thats a big marketing W.
I wanna see a sequel, im down for that.

Show me CDPR, show me the future, dont tell. I'll be waiting.

 

[Gargaune]

GOG was for long time my absolute favorite game store.
But when you realize they act like Linux doesn't exist, and there is more and more compromise about what DRM-Free is, there is rude awakening to fact that they becoming corporate profit-chasers.
And will probably continue in that direction.

Valve, on the other hand, is using Linux to separate from Microsoft who always lurks on their business.
So they did God's work with Proton, on which 90% Windows games are playable on Linux.
It is not that Valve are suddenly saints, we all know what they did to indie developers couple of years ago, but distinction between them is not big these days.

Linux hasn't been a factor for me thus far, so GOG's DRM-free proposition was an absolute win over Steam's client and mandatory updates, no contest. But with Microsoft forging ahead with turning Windows into a "live service", I might end up back in Valve's court anyway, regardless of what CD Projekt do going forward. Linux is still growing as an alternative though I'm more worried about older games, guess I'll cross that bridge once I get to it.

I'm hopeful CDPR learned their lesson with the biggest fuckup of CP2077. The expansion SEEMS good

Can I borrow your time machine? There's this horse I wanna put some money on.

 

[Crispy]

As long as they keep making cool tech demos to push our brand-new RTX4000-series GPUs to their limits to justify the several thousands of dollars we spend on them then I'll be happy.

 

[Falksi]

At least Bioware declined at a much slower pace than these gimps

 

[ropetight]

GOG was for long time my absolute favorite game store.
But when you realize they act like Linux doesn't exist, and there is more and more compromise about what DRM-Free is, there is rude awakening to fact that they becoming corporate profit-chasers.
And will probably continue in that direction.

Valve, on the other hand, is using Linux to separate from Microsoft who always lurks on their business.
So they did God's work with Proton, on which 90% Windows games are playable on Linux.
It is not that Valve are suddenly saints, we all know what they did to indie developers couple of years ago, but distinction between them is not big these days.

Linux hasn't been a factor for me thus far, so GOG's DRM-free proposition was an absolute win over Steam's client and mandatory updates, no contest. But with Microsoft forging ahead with turning Windows into a "live service", I might end up back in Valve's court anyway, regardless of what CD Projekt do going forward. Linux is still growing as an alternative though I'm more worried about older games, guess I'll cross that bridge once I get to it.

I was keeping dual-boot Windows for games until Windows 11, when Microsoft made decision that 3 year old hardware is not good enough for update. I know that people still play on XP and Seven, but some games and hardware just won't work on venerable minimum-spyware OS-es. That was a straw that broke camel's back, but constant forced updates breaking drivers and system had biggest impact.

I forgot to mention Valve's indirect contribution to Linux - with SteamDeck and SteamOS they finally forced nVidia to make decent driver support.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

valve employs multiple full-time linux developers(kernel, graphics drivers, and related software)

GOG(CDPR), to the best of my knowledge, has never so much as submitted a patch to dosbox which powers a massive portion of their titles released.

 

[ropetight]

valve employs multiple full-time linux developers(kernel, graphics drivers, and related software)

GOG(CDPR), to the best of my knowledge, has never so much as submitted a patch to dosbox which powers a massive portion of their titles released.

GOG don't even try to port their shitty client, but there are alternatives as Heroic, Lutris, GameHub and others.
In the end Valve will make DosBox run in Proton.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I have a Steam Deck and Linux support got good enough that more often than not you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between native Linux ports and stuff running under the Proton compatibility layer.

And it’s not a small minority of titles either. It’s basically 90% of what’s on Steam at this point.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

In the end Valve will make DosBox run in Proton.

dosbox has been native on linux since the beginning iirc

And it’s not a small minority of titles either. It’s basically 90% of what’s on Steam at this point.

at this point most of the games that don't work are due to anticheat, and even many of those run fine now but the issue is that the devs need to provide support when using things like EAC
doesn't really bother me because the massive majority of games with anticheat are crap

 

[ropetight]

In the end Valve will make DosBox run in Proton.

dosbox has been native on linux since the beginning iirc

It is, but lots of GOG old games are Windows only and require tinkering to make them work on Linux (using your local DosBox install, mounting drives, etc).
https://af.gog.com/forum/general_ar..._i_run_dosbox_games_under_linux?as=1649904300

 

[Child of Malkav]

Ah what a day. Don't worry guys, I'm sure it will be fine. All they have to do is release a shit game again and if the reception is bad they'll release some even shittier anime (that has nothing to do with nor improves the game in any way) and they'll sell some kajillion copies again, rounded up.
Gamers absolutely deserve this industry.

 

[Dodo1610]

Wild they are now moving people from Poland to the US.

Spoiler

Also unlike The Witcher games, this will be a sequel, though I have no idea how or what they are supposed to continue the CP2077 story.

 

[racofer]

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Cyberpunk Orion is probably the multiplayer game. Witcher 4 also apparently getting Multiplayer as well.
CDPR are going full Bethesda mode with this shit.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

everyone forgets the witcher moba that shut down like a week after launching
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher_Battle_Arena

 

[Gerrard]

everyone forgets the witcher moba that shut down like a week after launching
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher_Battle_Arena

Don't forget the mobile Pokemon GO killer.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

Five new twitchers? Lol. What a joke.

 

[Trithne]

Don't even pirate it. It won't be worth the download.

 

[Häyhä]

Desperate marketing hype talk of a failing company, they'll never deliver even half of this. I'm sure this is done purely to gain interest of some faceless monolith megacorp to purchase CDPR (oh the irony) before the inevitable collapse and I'd be willing to bet it'll happen in less than 5 years.