CD Projekt Red: who are they?

A quick glance at CD Pojekt Red video game developer, publisher and distributor, and its success in the gaming industry.

Who are they?

CD Projekt Red is a Polish video game developer, publisher and distributor. The company was established in 1994 with its founder members being Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kicińksi. Though they initially started as simple video game retailers, they slowly transitioned to the domestic distribution of foreign video game titles and soon after on their own developed titles.

Initial works

‘The Witcher’ series

Before making it “big”, they used to sell cracked copies of Western video games back in high school. They were huge fans of video games, but living in communist Poland made it extremely hard to find any video games. This helped with their decision to scale up their investment and conduct game distribution in a proper and legal way.

So, after founding their own company called CD Projekt, the first title they modified into a playable Polish version was Baldur’s Gate in collaboration with Interplay Entertainment. Although the first release was relatively successful, during the release of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, Interplay Entertainment dealt with a difficult financial situation, and canceled the release of the second title altogether. However, CD Projekt kept the source code and decided to form its development studio called CD Projekt Red in 2002 (led by Sebastian Zieliński), by which the all-famous title The Witcher was created.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Gerald of Rivia in black and brown leather suit holding sword with two hands and fighting beast on green grass field — *The Witcher 3: Wild hunt (image by WallDesk.com).*

After spending about 5 years in development, and collaborating with BioWare and Electronic Arts, the PC version of The Witcher was finally released in 2007 by Atari. Though there were some financial disputes with Atari over its console port, the series still made a great success that led to The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011) and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015).

‘Cyberpunk 2077’

With the release of Cyberpunk 2077 you could say that CD Projekt Red has received a massive amount of attention from the gaming community and the media. Be it the innovative game itself, guest star Keanu Reeves or the memes surrounding it, you have to admit that it went viral and that turned out to be a good thing for both parties.

If somehow you missed out on Cyberpunk 2077, it’s a first-person perspective RPG/Action game set in a dystopian future where the player has to deal with decisions, exploration, action-packed sequences, cyborgs and a great amount of character customization.

Cyberpunk 2077 wallpaper V sitting next to his car and watching Night City on sunset — *Cyberpunk 2077 (image by Wallpaper Abyss – Alpha Codes).*

The events take place in a mega-city called ‘Night City’, which is located in Northern California where corporations instead of the law are in charge, resulting in numerous gang wars and civil conflicts. The game is using the ‘REDengine 4’ and it took about 500 employees to complete it, which was much higher when compared to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The important thing is that the game opened many doors to new ideas for CD Projekt Red and its competition, and I believe we’re going to see awesome titles in the near future from that.

Other works

What you folks might not be aware of, is that CD Projekt also founded the digital content distribution platform GOG.com also known as “Good Old Games” in 2008. Even though the website aimed at selling older video game titles, after 2012 it started selling more contemporary ones.

They also added their own supported game library called GOG GALAXY 2.0 which resembles in principle and functions our beloved Steam library.