CD Projekt Red, the company behind the much beloved Witcher III game and the online DRM-free store, GoG, has made its stance on loot boxes very clear: it hates them. In a lengthy interview with PC Gamer, studio co-founder Marcin Iwińsk showed complete disdain for the practice, suggesting that it was a terrible way for companies to fleece gamers for additional profit post-launch.
"Where we stand is quite simple and you could see it with all of our past releases—most recently The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and GWENT.If you buy a full priced game, you should get a big, polished piece of content, which gives you many, many hours of fun gameplay," he said, in describing the difference between The Witcher III: Wild Hunt and some of the other games out there, specifically those that employed forced loot box mechanics.
When asked what he meant by "many" hours of gameplay, he was more than happy to explain. In short, he really does mean a lot.
"The definition of ‘many’ may vary on a title-by-title basis, but in our case it was always 50-60+ hours of the main story-line, with up to a couple of hundred of hours of side activities—if you really wanted to max out the title. To me, this is a fair deal. You get what you paid for, plus we are always trying our best to overdeliver. There is no better PR than a happy gamer recommending your title to their friends."
That is all too rare a sentiment these days, with companies like EA leading the charge for fleecing mechanics that featured heavily in games like Star Wars: Battlefront II.
Ultimately he said that as soon as you're grasping for your players' wallets after they have already purchased the game, you're being unfair. Players have spoken, he said, and they don't like it.
How refreshing.
