CD Projekt RED is incredibly popular in the gaming community. Despite having really only one game that is any sort of household name, The Witcher 3, this developer has gotten a surprising amount of name recognition and, perhaps more importantly, goodwill from fans and the community at large. The question is, what made fans start to worship the ground this developer walks on?
Following the release of The Witcher 3, CD Projekt RED has been lionized by RPG fans and the game industry alike. The Witcher 3 was nominated for numerous awards, culminating in CD Projekt RED winning the Best Developer Steam Award in 2018, still riding the wave of the popular 2015 game. It gained the reputation of both being one of the great RPG developers and a plucky indie underdog. This reputation has only increased as CDPR has gotten closer to releasing their next RPG, Cyberpunk 2077.
The Witcher 3 is not a bad game. It’s an objectively good game, actually, but it’s not necessarily revolutionary as an RPG. Even if it was, it’s premature to exalt a game studio based on one big hit.
If the only issue with CD Projekt RED was that they have an unusually large fandom for the one popular game they’ve released, there would be no issue. After all, other RPG developers like Blizzard or Bethesda have large dedicated fanbases, and they receive backlash every time they have a censorship scandal or buggy update. Yet CDPR has been seemingly canonized to the point where they cannot receive criticism, and any scandals they have are defended by their fans.
CD Projekt RED is not without its scandals either. GOG, a CD Projekt-owned distributer of classic games, routinely tweeted alt-right dog whistles, making jokes about transphobia, STDs, and GamerGate. Anyone raising concerns about GOG making edgy jokes or seemingly supporting misogynist gaming groups was shouted down by GOG’s fans, including anti-SJW and general shill Ian Miles Cheong. In addition, Cyberpunk 2077’s twitter has published controversial transphobic tweets as well, leading once again to questions about CD Projekt RED’s potential bigotry, which was then met by impassioned defenses of even the smallest criticisms.
Even outside of social media presence, CD Projekt RED is not a great company. The company has an abysmal record when it comes to overwork and crunch culture. In 2017, the company faced numerous complaints from former employees that worked on The Witcher 3 over the long hours they were forced to work as the deadline of the game approached. The company’s co-founder Martin Iwinski defended the company’s culture of overworking employees, saying that it was necessary for “creat[ing] innovation.”
It seemed like CDPR was trying to improve, if not eliminate, its crunch problems. Iwinski declared that for Cyberpunk 2077, the company was shifting towards a “non-obligatory crunch policy,” which is, granted, not eliminating crunch, but is at least better than an obligatory crunch policy. However, even this minor improvement was not meant to last. Since Cyberpunk 2077’s release date has been delayed, CDPR has told investors that the development team will be required to put in crunch hours.
CD Projekt RED is a corporation, and it will do what corporations do. It’s not a scrappy underdog or a indie studio working on a passion project. Their goal is to make money. This could mean that they’ll make jokes to attract the alt-right gamer demographic or overwork their employees to keep labor costs down and meet a deadline. No one needs to make it easier for them by doing free PR work.
