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Projekt Management - Part One

Tomasz Gop and Lukasz Kukawski on the Polish gaming scene and canning games

Formed in 1994 Polish publisher CD Projekt was the first to introduce fully localised products to the Polish gaming market. In more recent years the formation of its development arm Red studio, producers of the 2007 PC RPG title The Witcher, and creation of DRM-free digital distribution platform GOG.com (Good Old Games) have seen the publisher establish its wider market credentials.

Here, in the first of a two part interview, Red studio's senior producer Tomasz Gop and GOG.com's PR & marketing specialist Lukasz Kukawski discuss outsourcing, content cuts and the state of the Polish gaming market.

GamesIndustry.biz What are you working on at the moment?
Tomasz Gop

Well it's probably not too much of a surprise to say that I'm working on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, which we started developing almost as soon as we'd released the original Witcher game in 2007. We'll definitely be launching this title on PC and we're hoping to also release it on one of the consoles, though we're still in talks on that.

Tomasz Gop:
Lukasz Kukawski

At GOG.com we're working on adding more publishers to those whose games we already offer on the service and I can say that we'll be adding two big publishers this year [the first of which was Activision, announced last week].

GamesIndustry.biz You mention a possible console version for The Witcher 2. It's well known that the original Witcher game was due to be adapted for consoles under the title The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf by French developer, Widescreen Games, but that project was abandoned. Are there any plans to resurrect that development?
Tomasz Gop

Well, as you know, development on that title was suspended after things didn't work out with Widescreen Games and that's where it remains, suspended but not cancelled. Ultimately we walked away because of concerns over deadlines and the overall quality of the project and I'd say that the guys at Widescreen weren't solely to blame for that.

Walking away was a very hard thing to do but I think we learned a lot about outsourcing and we'd love to see Rise of the White Wolf released on consoles at some point, perhaps we could go back to that after the release of The Witcher 2.

At the time, however, we weren't prepared to make the cuts that seemed necessary in order to bring the project in on time, when we were still in the alpha stage when we were supposed to be near the end of the beta, cuts and compromises were a very real possibility.

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Stace Harman

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Stace Harman is a freelance writer and zombie survivalist. He writes mainly about video games but has also reported on topics ranging from airline security to Claudia Winkleman’s shoes.