It may be a matter of public record that I harbor a certain degree of dislike for Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, but really only in the sense that I wish him an eternity of pain and suffering at the claws of specially-trained torture demons, that his blighted genescape be eradicated from this earth as one might eradicate smallpox or plague. But I only feel this way because his pompous bean-counting has already damaged a creative industry, and he’s intent on turning that creativity into something that can be quantified on a spreadsheet. Still, reading my latest Game Informer, I could hardly blame Kotick for the remark that he wouldn’t have paid seven million dollars for Blizzard in 1995. Of course, he later paid something like 18 billion dollars for the company, but that was later.
And to think that just a few short years ago, Polish developer CD Projekt was nothing more than a small localization company that did translations of big games (they did Baldur’s Gate) for the Eastern European market. All that changed with The Witcher, the first CD Projekt-developed game. While the RPG was initially troubled by technical issues and long load times, CD Projekt’s continued support and releases of major upgrades allowed the game to get …