Mnementh said: Ka-pi96 said: So he gave them the rights to make Witcher games, permanently, for only a one time payment of 9.5k? What an idiot Yeah, that seems not right. If he gave them the right for one game for a one time payment, that would be right. But for games permanently? That seems off.

Agreed. I'd think there was a time limit to the deal. That or they could only do a trilogy. It could be the reason why there's no game in development now. They cdpr clearly have the means and talent. They haven't been working on cyberpunk since Witcher 3 release but significantly earlier. They knew that Sapkowski was coming.

I don't know how it works in Poland. But, if this were the US, I'd say he's fishing for a settlement, which he would certainly get. I'm guess a similar thing us possible in this case.

Wooow. Knew none of the history between the 2 parties. What he's trying to do is pretty messed up.

9500 USD? He really thought it would due that poorly??!! Makes me wonder how little of a cut they were offering. 5 cents a unit would beat 9500 USD after 190000 units sold.

I think he should get a percentage, not a big one since he originally screwed up. But most writers are actually in debt, as you point out it was 1998, he had no freaking idea how far the video game market was going to go and grow into. He was also probably broke. Most of these guys don't have an pro advisor telling them what to do. This happens in the music industry all the time at least in Latin America, plenty of hit song writers that took that enticing 3k us dollars and didnt get any royalties and now live in poverty. Big artists know exactly how those writers will end up and they don't  care. CDproject at least seemed like it acted on Goodwill by offering royalties. He should get his royalties anyways as I believe all writers should .

I partially agree with this, without CDprojekt Witcher doesn't grow to world wide game, but the without the books you don't have the universe or characters either. You were expecting a guy who probably never played a videogame 20 years  ago and was in probable financial trouble to predict that the game was going to be as successful as it was a decade and half later after its third iteration? The dude is a writer not an analyst. The 16 mil are a tad excessive. But a 5 mil settlement of some sort with a small percentage of future sells for example is not. Writers should learn from this mess to always demand royalties along with some money upfront.

Outrageous demand. He made a huge mistake by selling the IP and now after it is successful he tries to get a piece of the pie. It pissed me off that CD Project Red tries to find a settlement with him even though they are on the right side (from my pov).

I also want 16m from CDPR.

Doesn’t even have to be from CDPR actually.

I guess in court we will see the original terms and stuff. But I am Pretty sure thait in1998 he didn't think much of CDPROJEKT. 9.5 K was a pretty paltry offering. He must have been broke and again at that time CDProjekt wasn't close to what it is today. It will be an interesting case in court. He did write the thing so perhaps he is finally getting solid advice in terms of his lawyers .

Well he's also had a lot of allegations against him that he plagiarized  the work of other writers for The Witcher, but I've never looked into it enough to see if it's unsubstantiated...