The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is now an inescapable classic, so it seems almost incomprehensible that in the spring of 2015, CD Projekt RED seriously feared that a rival game would take away attention and store space from them – although, according to the Polish studio, there was a real chance that they would remain in the shadow of Batman: Arkham Knight.
When in 2015 the The Witcher 3: Wild Huntits success was so overwhelming that today it is difficult to imagine that the story could have turned out differently. However, from CD Projekt RED’s point of view, victory was by no means guaranteed in the months leading up to the release. The Polish studio was seriously worried about another release timed for the same summer: Rocksteady Batman: Arkham Knight they were afraid of his play, fearing that it would steal away the audience from them.
The concern was not merely that it was Arkham Knight was one of the most anticipated titles of the year. CDPR was much more afraid that Rocksteady’s open-world superhero game would simply push the The Witcher 3from retailers’ shelves. Michał Nowakowski, co-president of CDP, described the situation at the beginning of 2015 as retailers focusing their marketing activities on certain games, dividing them into separate time windows, giving them a prominent place in stores, while other titles are pushed into the background.
In the United States and Europe a The Witcher 3 distributed by Warner. By this time, CDPR had already put a lot of energy into convincing retailers, touring the UK and Europe and showing the game at partners like Walmart and GameStop. However, they often received answers such as: “You are not Bethesda.” To make matters worse, the studio eventually realized that it was Arkham Knight will be in stores around the same time as the The Witcher 3that is, the two games became direct competitors of each other. All this was aggravated by the fact that Warner Bros. was not only its distributor, but also its publisher Arkham Knightso he had a particularly strong incentive to primarily push Rocksteady’s game to the forefront.
According to Nowakowski, the key to the whole situation was how they could do marketing and whether they could even compete with the biggest publishers: “It was a big question of marketing execution, whether we could compete with the big ones. We had huge arguments, especially with US retail, but also in the UK, in the main markets, in Germany and elsewhere, because we had to convince them to actually allow us to spend money in those channels. Let’s say GameStop has one window, the main window, in which they sell a product. For two weeks, then two week to someone else. It’s their decision, their call.”
According to the co-president, retailers are actually making a bet when they decide which games to give this premium interface: “Whether they give away this game or that game is kind of a bet, and their decision could kill or elevate the game depending on it. Of course they wanted to make the right decision to sell as many copies as possible.” Nowakowski also recalled how depressed they became when it became abundantly clear to them that Rocksteady was the Batman: Arkham Knight-ot – “the one that included the car” – timed to exactly the same period as a The Witcher 3-at. “They were with us on one of the tours. They came to our show. We watched theirs. We thought these guys were really on top. They’re just going to blow us away. It’s going to be tough.”
Finally, however, fate intervened: a Batman: Arkham Knight its release was postponed from the original May date to June 23. THE The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt thus, it could receive more independent attention in the period around its publication – and the rest, as they say, is history.
Source: PCGamer
