Video games aren't cheap to make. And among video games, open world games are special: you've got to make more content than most people can feasibly experience, you've got to record giant amounts of dialogue, you've got to make assets for all of that, and you've got to make functional mechanics to boot. It might be on the high end of the spectrum, but GTA 5 reportedly cost $265 million. Destiny isn't open world, but still serves as an important budget point with its colossal $500 million. And yet, here we are now, with the attention of the video game world squarely on The Witcher 3. Its budget? $32 million, (another $35 for marketing). And it just sold 4 million copies in two weeks.
The Witcher 3 is a full scale AAA title, with more content than all but the very biggest games out there. Something that big at $35 million is very impressive, and Gamasutra estimates that it's already handily in the black. According to an interview in Wired with CD Projekt Red cofounder Marcin Iwinski keeping those costs down just comes down to having a tight team:
"It all comes down to some super-talented people working in Warsaw. I don't have any other answer for it! I was thinking about how Ubisoft does it. They have eight thousand people and not so many titles. We have two hundred twenty people working on this game and that's massive by our standards. They're super hard working, super organized. And that's it."
So we've got one the largest AAA games on the market right now, developed on a comparative budget. That alone is impressive, but it's after the sale where CD Projekt Red is doing even more interesting work. They're committed to giving out free DLC every week, when they could easily put all that content in a shop for $5 a pop. The extra content they are planning is reportedly huge, and while we'll reserve judgement until we see it, I have a feeling they'll deliver on that. Also, they packed a whole bunch of extras into the physical copy without making people shell out for a collector's edition. So basically, they took every trick that other publishers use to maximize revenue per sale and threw it out the window.
AAA budgets were supposed to shoot up with the new generation of consoles, and that does seem to be happening for a lot of games. They were also supposed to be way more microtransactions, which, again, we are seeing with a lot of games. And so The Witcher 3 serves as a quiet revolution: a game made well, made cheap, with a giant amount of content and free DLC to boot. There's little glitz in The Witcher 3, but what's there is exceptional. I hope other companies can learn something from what's happening here, but, maybe these guys are just special.
