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CD Projekt Red Talks Loot Box Controversy
There's little doubt that the central topic of 2017 was the pervasiveness (and toxicity, many would argue) of loot boxes in AAA games. From Shadow Of War to Star Wars: Battlefront II, loot boxes were inescapable. And it's a discussion far from over, with the the problem of loot boxes effect on minors reaching the world outside of gaming. Developers continue to be vocal about the issue as well.
In a recent interview with PC Gamer, CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński spoke plainly about his feelings regarding loot boxes and DLC.
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. 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.
The whole interview is a fascinating look into the design philosophy CD Projekt Red, a company that has a fantastic relationship with its gamers (though rumors of bad crunch culture at the company persist), and you should read it in its definitely read in its entirety here.
For more on CD Projekt Red, see which Witcher entries made our top 100 RPGs of all time and where they fell.
[Source: PC Gamer]
Our Take
It's no surprise that CD Projekt Red, which has often courted gamer as nicely as possible with free DLC and major updates, doesn't view loot boxes in the sunniest of terms. It'll be interesting to see more developers voice their take in the year to come.
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