While reading how Cyberpunk 2077 game is looking right now, I started thinking about how World of Darkness development looked while it was developed by CCP, and why could it turn out this way. But instead of bashing devs or management, I really wanted to get to the core of the problem, and found lots of stuff people could pick to make their game companies great.
I seen CDPR have this on their strategy page:
Mission statement - create revolutionary RPGs which go straight to the heart of gamers from around the world.
Business objective - be counted among the world’s top three videogame developers; to ensure a lasting place for owned brands in the global popular culture.
But how did they do that, how they really work in delivering these objectives, even with small team (200 peeps in time of developing Witcher 3)?
- No preying on consumers with micro transactions and similar stuff., just make great games.
- Aiming at the best quality they could get.
- Amazing story with lots of branching and different moral options.
- Starting from nothing and having to reset their first project not once but twice, but delivering the game finally. Perserverance in solving problems.
- Lots of language versions to get to as many players as possible: Witcher 3 was released simultaneously in 15 language versions, when something is good, you want everyone to play it, but you have to destroy language barrier first.
- Their own game engine: “continually upgraded, best-in-class software solution enables efficient development of complex and quality role-playing games set in vast open world environments”.
In CDPR own statement:
“Every role-playing game we ever developed seemed impossible to achieve at the moment we set out to create it … [but] even if something feels impossible, it doesn’t mean it is. As it turns out, most often things are perfectly possible, they just require a lot of faith, commitment and spirit,”
No compromise! But what about the people developing the game? They have to work under pression of all these objectives above. It is an environment where your commitment counts. Stubbornly, persistently pursuing the goal, solving problems each day, facing the tidal wave of work ahead.
Not for everybody, only the most commited to the goal.
CDPR is elite studio because of elite people it draws in, who are devoted to the goal of making the best game in the world. Something I remember CCP was when they were initially creating EVE, before 2003.
Essentially:
. Would you not have been happy with say Awesome?, or Amazing?.
