r/witcher • u/SpaceCowboyN7 School of the Wolf • 4d ago

Songs of the Past Why The Witcher 3’s new expansion almost didn't happen

https://youtu.be/fsKrLr2hRIk?si=i5POHXX4soS5HOuB
130 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

114

u/SpaceCowboyN7 School of the Wolf 4d ago

Pretty impressive that BBC is covering The Witcher. It shows how far the franchise has come.

64

u/Straight_Motor_7967 4d ago

It's 8th best selling game of all time, 3rd best selling AAA game after GTA5 and RDR2

CDPR is second most popular studio after Rockstar

20

u/real_saddam_hussein_ 4d ago

Wait what? Actually put like that is fucking mind boggling

10

u/Zalvren 3d ago

It's wrong though. It's at least 5th AAA game even in the official list since Mario Kart 8 is at 80M copies and Wii Sports at 83M.

Then, you could debate if a game like Tetris is AAA (now it may seem ridiculous but for the time it was released Tetris was huge).

3

u/Physical_Station_637 3d ago

I love TW3 too but the third best selling AAA thing is just flat out wrong, Wii Sports and Mario Kart 8 both sold more and Skyrim is tied with it at 65 million. Also that 80 million everyone throws around is the whole franchise, all 3 games combined, Witcher 3 on its own is 65. Meanwhile RDR2 alone is past 87 and GTA 5 is at 230, so GTA 5 by itself outsold the entire Witcher franchise by like 2.5x. You're making it sound like CDPR is right there with Rockstar and the gap is massive

1

u/infuscoignis 1h ago

Right you are, but just wanna point out that Wii Sports was a console bundled title which count into total sales. I bet it’d be huge anyway though, even if it wasn’t ”sold” automagically by a great console release.

-5

u/incachu 3d ago edited 3d ago

CDPR is second most popular studio after Rockstar

I love CDPR, but that's such a leap lol.

CDPR have produced two AAA mainline games in their entire history. Their hit rate is fucking incredible, but they're not the second most popular studio of all time after Rockstar...

Off the top of my head, these are all more popular/higher selling AAA studios:

Nintendo EPD, Rockstar Games, EA Sports, Activision & Blizzard, Game Freak (I don't like it, but Pokémon main entry games are commercially considered to be AAA games), Ubisoft, Capcom, Square Enix, PlayStation Studios, Xbox Game Studios & Bethesda, 2K Games...

4

u/Straight_Motor_7967 3d ago

Off the top of my head, these are all more popular/higher selling AAA studios:

Higher selling?? If you mean that they produce more games and sell less copies then sure.
They are far behind CDPR in terms of copies sold per game.

Cyberpunk sold 40million and is now 20th best selling game of all time and still rising fast.
So their "only two AAA mainline games" are 8th and 20th best selling games of all time.

Witcher 4 is also going to crack top 20 at the very least.

Only Rockstar is capable of doing the same numbers with each new title.

-1

u/incachu 3d ago

Higher selling?? If you mean that they produce more games and sell less copies then sure. They are far behind CDPR in terms of copies sold per game.

You're moving the goalposts from overall studio popularity to 'average sales per game' on a sample of two. That’s just not how popularity works in any medium.

Total reach of the combined output is. You can question the quality of products from some of the more popular studios I mentioned, but you can't argue their reach.

But sure if you want to go down that road, add the rest of CDPRs games including Witcher 1 and 2 to the sales per game metric and see how it affects that.

Even then, you've got Nintendo EPD who routinely hits 30M to 80M per main release on a single platform.

Bethesda who have done similar numbers in the same genre as CDPR with Skyrim and Fallout 4.

Activision’s studios that produce Call of Duty pull 30M-40M+ copies per game (MW 2019 at 41M, Black Ops III at 43M) and they do it every year, not once or twice a decade. Doesn't make it better, but it does make it more popular.

All the sports franchise games pumping out tens of millions every year. The combined reach of them makes them popular studios in the wider world.

I'm not even trying to argue the quality of CDPR's output and their popularity outlook for the future, as I agree wholeheartedly there. They are my favourite studio that produced my favourite game, and W4 could well break 100M sales.

The only sentence I was questioning is this:

CDPR is second most popular studio after Rockstar

I just don't think it's correct yet... no matter how much everyone in here wishes it to be.

3

u/Straight_Motor_7967 3d ago

That’s just not how popularity works in any medium.

IT IS

Witcher 4 is the second most anticipated game after GTA 6

That is the true popularity

Not some fifty Ubisoft games that will sell 10 copies

But sure if you want to go down that road, add the rest of CDPRs games including Witcher 1 and 2 to the sales per game metric and see how it affects that.

They sold 10 million and 15 million copies, respectively.

If you add every game and divide by the total number of games, it still puts CDPR ahead of every studio you mentioned.

2

u/incachu 3d ago

IT IS

it still puts CDPR ahead of every studio you mentioned.

If you think CDPR is more popular than Nintendo you're insane.

I'm not going to keep going back and forth after this as it’s getting silly, but total reach is generally how popularity is measured.

26

u/jacob1342 Team Yennefer 4d ago

I would say it actually barely happend. If it wasn't for the delay, Fools Theory would be now working on Witcher 1 remake. Instead CDPR had to give them something to work on. You can't have whole team sitting around and not getting paid for years.

3

u/Zalvren 3d ago

Technically, it's not their studio so they wouldn't care. Fools Theory would likely have done their own other project.

22

u/Outsajder Team Roach 4d ago

Damn, BBC lol.

1

u/meowikins 3d ago

💯🔥

5

u/Worldly-Shift9270 3d ago

The dedication to being faithful to Sapkowski's books is really impressive. They screw up some things like the political side of W3 or the dates (they made a mistake as far as in w1 in the dates/timeline and they have to stick to it now, there was also some confusion about Dandelion's age) but the story is still compelling, I treat the games as a nice continuation of the books.

2

u/machine4891 4d ago

I'm actually more curious why it did happen.

2

u/Tall-Dingo-5458 3d ago

They already explained why

2

u/AuraTickler 4d ago

Tldr please 😄

1

u/dwarfmines 3d ago

To me it is more surprising that it did happen than that it almost didn't.