CD Projekt RED - Interview @ Games Industri
Adam Badowski , head of CD Project Red, has talked - at length - with Gamesindustry.biz.
The talk has resulated in an interview that sets its apart from other interviews today. The interview is somewhat longer than we're just too and Adam Badowski actually also has some noteworthy things to say about different subjects. He, Adam Badowski talks about these subjects in the inteview their design philosophy, Cyberpunk 2077, GOG.com, the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. He also talks about the probability of a publisher which might be buying the studio in the future, and much much more.
On the prospect of being bought, here's Adam's take on this:
Q: Your success and ambition certainly hasn't gone unnoticed, and I'm sure that there are companies who have looked at CD Projekt RED with an eye to acquisition. Does that fit with your plans at all?
Adam Badowski: Independence is a crucial part of our strategy. That means we need to be independent in both ways. First, financially and secondly creatively - they're both crucial for us. So as a company we're listed publicly on the Warsaw stock exchange, which gave us financial independence and creatively we own all our IP so we're free to invest in our own business with total creative freedom. This gives us a fresh eye in the studio, so it's very important to us. Maybe we could get extra money or experience, but it wouldn't make us happy.
Here's a quote about how he sees the growth of the company:
Q: CD Projekt RED has gone from strength to strength by aiming for niche products with great ambition. That's quite a high risk approach - what made you confident that you would succeed?
Adam Badowski: Growing was hard, but this has always been our studio's policy and our team's policy. We have always aimed for ambitious projects. I believe that if you want to succeed, creative vision has to inform business policy and not the other way around - that's crucial for us. Sometimes business will decide a company's creative policy, that's very bad for a studio.........To succeed you have to believe in your project first and then do your job 100 per cent. So the creative side and your heart comes first. Business should be based around your vision.
And here's a quote about Cyperbunk 2077:
Q: The Witcher series maintains an excellent balance of established tropes and fresh ideas, setting up expectations and confounding them. Will we see a similar approach to 2077?
Adam Badowski: We always wanted to avoid simple good and evil scenarios. The war between good and evil isn't interesting for us. We love controversial stuff, anti-heroes, Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, for example. So we have controversial roles and post-modern influences in the storyline. We have a lot of work ahead of us in that regard because the established plots for Cyberpunk - the wars between corporations, fighting against advanced AI, wars over energy sources, have already all been covered quite thoroughly. There's also the Cyberpunk 2020 game from the '90s. Those scenarios are very familiar.