The Witcher 3 developers’ loftiest goals for the number of sales its seminal RPG would manage were achieved in a single quarter.
In an interview with PC Gamer to celebrate The Witcher 3’s 10th anniversary, Michal Nowakowski, joint-CEO at CD Projekt Red, explains that the studio had “super ambitious goals” for the game’s sales. Those goals amounted to “maybe six million units,” Nowakowski says, a figure that the game didn’t take very long to hit.
In fact, that number is one “which we ended up achieving in, I think, about a quarter,” Nowakowski says, outlining that CDPR’s lifetime sales projections for their game were hit within three months. In reality, those lifetime figures have exceeded 50 million copies, placing The Witcher 3 inside the top 20 best-selling games of all time. And with the series’ ongoing popularity and the relatively recent release of its new-gen edition, that number is still likely to be slowly growing.
But Nowakowski and his team had no idea that would be how things panned out back in 2015. In fact, he says he was deeply concerned that another game would eat The Witcher 3’s lunch. The highly anticipated release of Batman: Arkham Knight, the latest iteration of the acclaimed Arkhamverse series, was due just over a month after The Witcher 3. Nowakowski feared Rocksteady’s sequel would “roll over us,” but in reality, Geralt came out on top of Batman – a tricky PC port meant that while Arkham Knight was generally well-received, it didn’t make the same splash Nowakowski was worried about, eventually selling 5 million copies in its own first quarter.
Geralt won that particular battle, and it seems he probably won the war too. While CD Projekt pushed out the eventually-good Cyberpunk 2077 and is now well into production on The Witcher 4, Rocksteady spent nearly a decade creating its own follow-up, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which is said to have flopped to the tune of nearly $200 million, and has become something of a scapegoat for Warner Bros’ recent suite of financial failures. I know which horse I would have preferred to have backed 9 years ago.
