#22 GOŚĆ RAFAŁA IRZYŃSKIEGO: Adam Kiciński, CD Projekt S.A. (08.04.2016), część pierwsza

Yes, I am satisfied. We are all satisfied. As for the goals we set for the company in 2011 for 4 years, that is by the end of 2015, all those goals are greatly exceeded. So it's hard not to be satisfied. Although we have this trait that we are never fully satisfied, we always find something we are not satisfied with, which I won't talk about now, but it's not that it's full satisfaction, there are things we are not satisfied with. But of course the overall picture is very good. The company is practically debt-free, has huge cash resources, but those big premieres that bring such profits are planned for a bit further in time. 2016 does not have a loud premiere here, but there are add-ons and what other events in 2016? First, in the second quarter, the second add-on to The Witcher, Blood and Wine, a very big thing, incredibly expanded add-on, we are excited about it. This year also a game in a format we haven't been present in yet, but I can't say anything more today on that topic. We will also intensively support sales of The Witcher 3 because The Witcher 3 is one of the best games in history, it's the best game of last year, and there are still many players who would probably gladly buy The Witcher. Besides, when we look at sales of RPG Witcher games over a longer period, it turns out that sales in the initial phase drop a bit and then even grow in units as well as revenue, so RPG Witcher games are long sellers, so we will work on sales of The Witcher 3 for many more years. But this year is special because we have the second add-on and certain other sales events we have planned.

That's right, yes, that's right. Almost all development costs accumulated on the balance sheet related to The Witcher 3 were already amortized last year. Therefore, it can be said that for The Witcher 3, in a very simplified way, revenue equals... Of course, we incur marketing costs related to these actions we are planning or related to the add-on. But that is not the same level of costs as last year.

We have financial goals, but we cannot disclose them because we do not provide forecasts. So far we have only provided assumptions for the incentive program, but it has a longer time frame, the longest period of the incentive program, which will be voted on at the general meeting, so it is not yet approved, it is a project, it is a period of 6 years. And from this program it follows that we would like to earn over one billion zloty net over these 6 years. However, regarding The Witcher, further Witchers, we have never announced anything like that. We have even said that there will be no The Witcher 4. The Witcher as we know it was designed from the beginning as a trilogy, so the third part must be the last part. And I won't say anything more on this topic today. That's it.

It won't be, I can say that. However, we have said many times that it would be completely unreasonable to say goodbye to this world. But for now, we are focusing, when it comes to big games, we are focusing on the game Cyberpunk 2077 and it will be the first big game, such a huge RPG, which...

We produced it in 3 years. However, we made certain assumptions about the third part much earlier, because as I said, The Witcher was planned from the beginning as a trilogy. As for Cyberpunk, the first work started back in 2011, purely preparatory. The project was expanded, the team was expanded in 2012, 13, 14, so it has been going on for several years. However, consciously finishing work on The Witcher 3, we focused a large part of the team around The Witcher, and even people who were involved in Cyber for some time greatly supported the production or final work on The Witcher 3. And as you can see, it paid off. However, this long time associated with the pre-production of Cyberpunk gives me, as a manager, hope - because I look at it from a perspective, I am not a creator - hope that this game will be very well thought out, that the ideas we want to realize in Cyberpunk will be really, really thoroughly thought out and will be very good.

and will be very good.

Yes, most of the people who work in this development part of our group are already working on Cyberpunk. However, as I said, we are still in pre-production, so we will have to wait a bit for Cyberpunk.

We want to make more games. We want to have, actually we already have four teams, but they are not yet fully formed. We want to reach a state where we have four teams, of which some, say two, will be working on projects in segments where we have not operated so far, where we were practically absent or almost absent. And we want to have two large teams responsible for big games. We simply want to do more in a given time, meaning we want to increase production capacity. However, one should not expect that in any foreseeable future we will release a big game every year, because that would require even more teams. Besides, such a calendar approach is not something we prefer. We want to release very good games and make them as long as necessary for them to be created. But the company intended to enter, for example, mobile devices, the free-to-play sector, or maybe other games. We have already entered mobile devices in the free-to-play sector, because last year we released an experimental game, The Witcher Battle Arena. We learned a lot from it, and we built a team around this project that continues to work on projects that are currently undisclosed.