The Polish game company behind big games like The Witcher series and the upcoming action game Cyberpunk 2077 has surpassed France's Ubisoft to become Europe's most valuable game company.
CD Projekt Surpasses Ubisoft
In a report by the Video Games Chronicles, the company reached the top spot after being valued at $8.13 billion, a huge increase compared to its last market capitalization at $6.8 billion in December 2019 only.
In addition, the company has had the biggest rise of any stock that was listed on the Stoxx Europe 600 Index after it had a return of 21,000% over the last decade, according to Bloomberg.
It's upcoming game, Cyberpunk 2077, is highly-anticipated and would have been released if not for the delays brought by the novel coronavirus pandemic that forced companies like CD Projekt to enforce work-from-home.
CD Projekt's gaming branch, CD Projekt Red, only has a handful of games, as per GameSpot, but that did not stop the company from conquering the European gaming scene.
The company also owns GOG.
Nevertheless, Ubisoft is not far behind as it was valued at $8.12 billion.
Although the numbers are still relatively small compared to the giants of the gaming industry, including Nintendo, which is valued at $53.73 billion as well as Activision Blizzard at $56.27 billion, the stats are still pretty good for the company.
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The Rise of The Witcher 3
CD Projekt's rise is not surprising, seeing as The Witcher 3, which is the last game of the series so far, is still doing exceptionally well despite being released five years ago.
The game even grew more popular after streaming platform Netflix made a live-action adaptation of The Witcher, although it was based on the books instead of the game.
Nevertheless, the series did make the game a little more popular outside of the gaming community.
The Witcher 3 was huge even before the adaptation began, especially compared to its predecessors. Perhaps the biggest reason was deviating from the first two games and featuring an open world.
The Game's Open World Success
In an interview with Polygon, CDPR talked about the open-world feature of the game.
"Our quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, said that the main goal [of The Witcher 3] was to combine the design philosophy of previous Witcher games, which was to create a complex and mature story that has choices and consequences, with an open world," said Philipp Weber, the senior quest designer of the game.
According to them, there has always been a preconceived notion that open-world games can't tell deep or exciting stories, and that's why they took it as a challenge.
The team also disclosed that they initially thought that the game was too short, which is why they tried to add more content to it.
Nevertheless, they were surprised to know that people kept coming back to it and would mention how long they have been playing the game, and it's all because of the depth the open world feature has given them.
As fans of the game would say, they definitely nailed that challenge and have created one of the most popular games of all time, bringing us the story of the Witchers and the monsters that they slay.
