If you don’t know the story about The Witcher Creator/Author Andrzej Sapkowski that he sold CD PROJEKT RED the rights of the Witcher series without opting for the Royalties it would generate for him. Though he did say that he has nothing against the video games, but it was stupid of him to do so.
This is especially important because The Witcher video games have received numerous awards and generated a lot of revenue for the company. Recently, the author of the infamous Metro 2033 series Dmitry Glukhovsky said about Sapkowski while speaking with WayPoint.
I think that he’s totally wrong, and that he’s an arrogant motherf*cker.
Without the gaming franchise, the Witcher series would never get this crazy international readership that it has. And it’s not just about the gamers but the gaming press and the buzz it creates, and just the feeling of something great and massive and impressive coming out. This got people hooked. He would remain a local Eastern European phenomenon without this, but he would never break into the West. And the same goes for my Metro books.
It happened so that the game developers were among the first readers. The creative lead of 4A Games, Andrei Proharov, was sent a link to the website by some of his friends, and he read it overnight and thought it was a perfect story for their next game.
I decided to use this opportunity to tell my own kind of story, and I was not at all judging video games as a danger to my precious property. Quite the contrary, I thought that it’s a great opportunity to promote the entire IP. And that was exactly the way it worked.
While The Witcher series was quite unknown to the rest of the world before the release of the first Witcher game, the games based on the novel(s) have actually made it an international, brand. Overall, without the author selling the rights to the CD PROJEKT RED maybe foolish monetarily; the fact that the world saw an amazing new franchise emerge because of it, is outstanding.
