$9,400 – that's what CD Projekt RED paid for the Witcher license

A few days ago we wrote about the ridiculously low sum of money (about $4,000) that Adrian Chmielarz’s studio Metropolis paid Andrzej Sapkowki for the rights to create a Witcher game back in the 1990s. Although that project never saw the light of day (not to count a simple mobile title), another attempt at adapting Sapkowski’s novels as video games was made by CD Projekt RED, which, as we know now, turned into a massive multimillion success. How much, then, did CD Projekt RED pay for the license? Not much more than Metropolis did – it was PLN 35,000, which now stands for about $9,400. And to think that Sapkowski refused a percentage of the profits… Of course, that was still quite much back then for a small Poland-based studio that was just making their first steps in gamedev, but considering the dividends they are reaping now, that was peanuts.

The first version of CD Projekt RED’s Witcher game was more like Baldur’s Gate.

This information comes from Sebastian Zielinski, a former project leader at CD Projekt RED, who replied to Adrian Chmielarz’s Friday comment on Facebook. In early 2000s, the Polish studio was busy preparing a PC conversion of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance for Interplay, which was eventually cancelled. After that the team decided to use the work they had made so far and prepare a game of their own, for which they bought the Witcher license. However, the 2003 demo was so bad that no one wanted to invest in the game. Soon after, CD Projekt decided to move RED studio from Lodz to Warsaw, at which point Sebastian Zielinski chose to leave. Michal Kicinski took over the project and together with Marcin Iwinski he gained support of BioWare – the company let them use its Aurora engine and helped promote the game. That ultimately led to releasing the first Witcher video game in 2007.