poisonelf said:
Why shouldn't I "hold my breath"? What you described is exactly what I expect to happen, and the reason I feel like laughing at some faces. That is, the game selling a couple of million, which is more than some over-advertised console exclusives actually, making the company millions in pure profit, and setting a precedence for similar projects.
That's not the same as saying that it will sell like CoD or Halo, that big publishers will concentrate on the PC, or anything to that effect. Not even similar.
I think the precendence is already there, and it's abundance. It's not like The Witcher 2 selling 2 millions will push people to think "Hey, this game sold like 300k units more than the graphically average previous one, it's time to totally sink millions into making cutting edge graphics we can't afford cause our artists cost 4 times as much!".
If TW2 sold 5, 6 million units, then you'd probably be right (and heck, maybe it will, one can always hope); but if it ends up being a 2 million sold-copies project that nets CDProjekt some 20, 30 millions of income (and I'm blowing numbers for the benefit of your argument), big publishers will see that money as change, and them and everyone else will keep looking at Minecraft and Angry Birds as the future market that has low cost and massive returns.
As for the costs, if we attribute most of that 8m. figure to salaries, and we then multiply it x3 or even x4 to match that of the US (I think?), it's still much low for its (apparent) quality and scope. So stop attributing 100% of the game's relatively low budget to it being made in Poland.
30-40 millions without advertisement (I seriously doubt those semi-porn photoshoots costed them more than a few tens of thousands) is a "low budget" now? And what's budget if not salaries? I doubt CDP is licensing anything beyond probably Havok and the usual stuff, and those royalties are the same everyone else is paying. They can afford (for the same reason as above) to have their own engine, so no royalty fee there either... so it's all about workforce.
What's their magic formula for having a sensible budget? Not having to buy IGN? Cutting on prostitutes for the moneyhats? As far as I can see, game developing is fundamentally made of workforce. And being able to have 16 guys drawing textures instead of 4 is gonna massively affect the way you work and the results. It's all about human resources, and we're not talking about sweatshops here - the guys at CDP are probably as good if not more so than the Bioware guys. My insistance on this point is based on the fact that this is the real relevant precendent that TW2 may leave: it may prove that you can outsource your game in a developing country where you'll find artists and developers every bit as talented as the ones you have home and that cost a fraction of that.
If CDP pulls an AAA game with that budget, now that's something the industry WILL notice. Even being conservative the idea of cutting your budget in half simply by choosing a country where you'll find competent workforce for less is incredibly appealing. It happened in almost every other industry, and CDP is probably gonna set an historical precedent with TW2.
I'm not really going to argue here. I unfortunately expect the same. I also expect the combination of fan backlash, development costs for consoles, and reduction in game quality to drive CD Projekt to be assimilated by the usual empires.
I wouldn't be so negative. They're a publisher themselves, in the end. They can probably afford their indipendency just like Valve did. And Valve is probably loving the console money they're getting from Portal 2, and it's probably more than the PC money, and it won't probably change their policy one bit. It's just a beefy, juicy extra.
