Tag Archives: Michal Kicinski

CD Projekt has has announced its founders, Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski have resigned from their positions as CEO and director of business development, respectively.

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CD Projekt CEO Michal Kicinski has claimed that payments to Widescreen in relation to The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf development were met as per contract, despite Widescreen telling VG247 today that CDP failed in its financial obligations with the game.

The following was posted in the comments thread of this article, which contained quoted from Widescreen boss Olivier Masclef on the matter:

It is sad that we cannot talk with WSG in normal business way, but communicate through media. It is absolutely not our style of making business, and we answer here as we feel forced to do this to clarify the unclear information:
1. All payments were done on time according to milestone plan.
2. Truth is that payments were later than originally planned but this was solely due to delays in production. The delays were growing in the project due to WSG continued to miss the deadlines.
3. Delays and risks of further development by WSG were unacceptable by CD Projekt (this happened even though CDProjekt RED was constantly increasing main team involvement to help in the production). The most important fact is that development process didn’t make planned release date possible and moreover propositions of the new release date were changing few times. Besides the schedule, technical incapability created a risk of missing planned quality which is absolutely unacceptable. And this brought an end in our cooperation with WSG.
4. Currently the works are on hold. We are evaluating all possible options to continue the production.
Making this decision was extremely difficult and sad as we know that many people are waiting for this project. We do our best to find a way out of this situation. But final decision must guarantee high quality of the product, otherwise we won’t continue the production no matter what consequences it will bring. We are committed to the highest quality of all our games, and this is unnegotiable for us.
So no matter what the final decision or solution we will find, please be sure that it will be the best for the game quality, and satisfaction of gamers, which is the most important for us!
Michal Kicinski
Joint CEO
CD Projekt Group

CD Projekt’s issued a sarcastic press release confirming that The Witcher’s sold 1 million units in 12 months at retail.

“CD Projekt RED is proud to announce that The Witcher, the epic RPG that puts players in the morally lenient boots of the aforementioned anti-hero, has sold more than a million copies to real, live people since its release twelve months ago,” said the company.

“Scientific research has proven that those sales numbers are quite good for a debut game based on a relatively unfamiliar IP from an unknown studio on a ‘dead’ platform.”

Michal Kicinski, co-founder of CD Projekt, went on to say that the RPG may be looking at a console future.

“This is really just the beginning for us,” he said. “There are a lot more places to explore in the world of The Witcher and there’s obviously a huge audience out there that would still love to see the game on consoles

“We’re PC developers first and foremost, but you never know!”

Full thing after the break.

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Michal Kicinski, CEO of CD Projekt, has claimed that publishers are “scared” to release DRM-free PC games, saying firms are shying away from CD Projekt’s new digital distribution project, GOG.com, thanks to its rights-free policy.

“We’re trying to convince them there is nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “DRM-free, that is something they are really scared of, but on the other hand we can say ‘all of those games are available pirated widely so it’s better to sell them for small money than make the customer’s life difficult and get some more revenues’.”

Kicinski added: “We’re gamers and we are using all these digital distribution platforms. I had Steam but I had the problem that my internet provider could not work with it so I couldn’t use the games I bought. I think that if somebody is paying for the game then they deserve own it, not with a certain list of conditions and sometimes the list of conditions can be long.”

More on GI.

According to this, CD Projekt has acquired a controlling stake in fellow Polish developer Metropolis.

With the inclusion of the Metropolis team and splitting the existing CD Projekt studio into two, the company is now working on three projects. CD Projekt is most famous for The Witcher, the PC RPG which recently announced sales of 600,000 in three months.

“I’m very happy that we managed to combine the strengths of two key development teams in Poland. Metropolis and CD Projekt have many values in common: we believe that the success of our products depends on innovative character and atmosphere, as well as uncompromising care of the highest quality,” said CD Projekt CEO Michal Kicinski in a statement.