Why Now Is The Best Time To Remake The Original Witcher Game
With the new Netflix series gaining a large following and the subsequent resurgence of players jumping back into the hit game series, The Witcher is now a popular multimedia franchise with success in the original Polish novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, the games, and the new Netflix show. Now that there is a much larger audience for the series, CD Projekt Red has a clear opportunity to capitalize on a remake of the original game, which arguably kick-started it all to bring the level of popularity that it has today.
When CD Projekt Red first developed The Witcher, it was not as big a game studio as it is nowadays. The studio was founded in Poland in 1994 by the owners of CD Projekt S.A. which was a localization company with a primary focus on distributing foreign games to the Polish market. Similarly to Valve, CD Projekt Red launched its own digital games storefront called GOG in 2008, a service that the company still operates. 2008 was also the year when CD Projekt Red hit the one-million-units-sold milestone after the release of The Witcher in the previous year.
As of 2019, The Witcher series as a whole has sold over 40 million units to customers, with the lion’s share of that figure going to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which sold 4 million copies in its first two weeks alone. The third game in the series is responsible for over half of those sales alone and that fact carries an interesting implication - most people who have played any of The Witcher games may have never played the second installment, The Witcher 2 Assassins of Kings, and even more so, 2007’s The Witcher. This is another reason why the opportunity is ripe for CD Projekt Red to remake the original title.
As a related example, back in 2014, Sony went with the decision to remaster The Last of Us for PS4 for specifically the same reason mentioned above. The majority of PS4 owners at the time never played the game, so it was a great opportunity to re-up. As such, CD Projekt Red would do well to take advantage of the same situation, especially after building the franchise to what it is. For these players who fall within the majority of people who have never played the original The Witcher, a remake of the game (which does require significantly more work than a remaster) would provide the context behind Geralt’s first tales that were sorely missed in the third game.
In The Witcher 3, besides anecdotal dialogue, all players are ever really given in the way of context, for the first games, is a brief list of choices toward the beginning that simulate save data from the previous games. Geralt’s first stories from the novels, such as his encounter with Foltest’s Striga, have already been used as source material so recent players are missing a good chunk of the narrative. Speaking of Foltest and his accursed Striga, that storyline was adapted into one of the more memorable moments from the new Netflix show, speaking to how popular a remake of this story itself could be.
Netflix's The Witcher has become so successful that it had even outperformed Disney's newest Star Wars series, The Mandalorian. It stands to reason that a good amount of these new fans are going to want to consume more content from The Witcher in some form or another. Though they can still read published translations of Sapkowki’s novels, a remake of The Witcher would make many fans more comfortable to jump into the video games. A general rule of thumb when it comes to sequels is that numbers tend to scare off people who feel they missed something which is another reason why a remake would work well.
CD Projekt Red would also benefit from the fact that a remake of The Witcher would appear on more platforms, rather than the original’s standalone release on PC. For now though, the game studio is hard at work on the imminent release of Cyberpunk 2077, which is set to launch April 16, 2020 on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One. In other words, if a Witcher remake was ever on the doc, it still wouldn't be releasing too soon.
The Witcher is available now on PC.
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