In the spring of 2015, CD Projekt RED (CDPR) feared that another game would steal their audience.

When The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released, its success was overwhelming. It’s hard to imagine it could have turned out any other way. However, success was far from certain in the months leading up to the release. The Polish studio was concerned that another game, Batman: Arkham Knight from Rocksteady, would come out that same summer and steal their audience. It wasn’t just that Arkham Knight was a highly anticipated game. CDPR was more concerned that Rocksteady’s open-world superhero game would push The Witcher 3 off retailers’ shelves. In early 2015, CDP co-president Michał Nowakowski explained the situation as follows. “Retailers focus their marketing activities on certain games at different times and give them priority on their shelves.”

In the United States and Europe, Warner distributed The Witcher 3. CDPR had already made significant efforts to win over retailers, traveling throughout the United Kingdom and Europe to showcase the game at stores like Walmart and GameStop. Often, they received responses such as, “You’re not Bethesda.” The situation was further exacerbated when CDPR realized that Arkham Knight would be released at the same time as The Witcher 3, making the two games direct competitors. To make matters worse, Warner Bros. was the distributor and publisher of Arkham Knight, meaning it had an added incentive to ensure Rocksteady’s game was as successful as possible.

“There was a big question about the execution of the marketing. Are we going to be on par with the biggest companies out there? We had huge discussions, especially with retail in the US and the UK—the main markets—Germany, etc., because we had to convince them that we could spend money on those channels. For example, Gamestop has a main window that they are going to sell to you. They sell it to someone for two weeks, then to someone else for two weeks. It’s their decision. It’s their call.

They decide whether to give it to one game or another, and their decision could make or break your game. Of course, they want to make the right decision to sell as many units as possible. I still remember how disappointed we were when we learned that Rocksteady was going to launch Batman: Arkham Knight—I think it was the one with the car because they were with us on one of the tours. They showed up for our demo. They showed us theirs. Like, oh god, these guys are really at the top. I mean, they’re just going to roll over us. It’s going to be tough,” Nowakowski said.

In the end, fate intervened and the release of Arkham Knight was postponed from May to June 23. The rest, as they say, is history.

Source: PCGamer