Meet The Mysterious Former Billionaire Behind The Video Game Disaster Cyberpunk 2077

Polish developer CD Projekt Red just released the most-anticipated game of the year, making its top executives very rich. Then it became the latest debacle of 2020—costing cofounder Michał Kiciński half a billion dollars.

^When a company spends nearly a decade developing the most overhyped and underwhelming video game of the year, the failure has many fathers. Granted, with more than 8 million pre-orders, Cyberpunk 2077 had already turned a profit for Polish developer CD Projekt, the company behind the juggernaut Witcher video game series. But the December 10 release of Cyberpunk 2077 soon became a disaster of Fyre Festival proportions. Not only does the game perform terribly on last-gen consoles such PS4 and Xbox One, but there are also countless bugs—including basic game development fails that make walking, talking, and shooting difficult. Most hilariously, the customizable genitalia for the character V causes penises to fall out of his (or her) pants.

The Cyberpunk 2077 debacle also cost CD Projekt Red’s two cofounders a combined $1 billion in wealth when its stock tumbled by some 40% this past week—though joint CEO Marcin Iwiński is still worth an estimated $964 million. CD Projekt Red—which had revenues of $140 million last year—was expecting to start a new supercycle with Cyberpunk 2077 likely to further propel its stock price, but it is now focused on damage control. 

For now, the company remains a target of short sellers, but it has worked desperately hard this week to stop the free fall. On December 14, CD Projekt Red issued an apology to gamers, vowing to fix the numerous glitches and offering those who purchased the game an “opt to refund.” 

Then on December 17, Sony delivered a crushing blow—it removed Cyberpunk 2077 from its PlayStation store and offered refunds to customers who purchased the game. The next day, Microsoft announced that it would also provide refunds but the game remains for sale in its store.

One CD Projekt Red cofounder, however, has largely escaped the world of hurt the open-world game has received from gaming critics and outraged customers.

^Michał Kiciński comes across like a man who values his Buddhist beliefs more than his tenuous billionaire status—which he achieved twice during Cyberpunk’s recent hype cycle. (Two weeks ago, Kiciński was worth an estimated $1.2 billion. His stake in CD Projekt has now fallen to $750 million.) “I’m not in the position to advise anybody,” he told Forbes on the phone as Cyberpunk 2077 neared its crunch period in July. “Of course [it’s] very close to me. I see CD Projekt as my child, which is now mature and goes by itself.”

The 46-year-old Kiciński left the Warsaw-based company in 2013, soon after Cyberpunk 2077 was first announced. Burnt out by years of creativity and conflict, he was also weary from weathering the large company debts and bad decision-making that had threatened to end the studio he cofounded with Iwiński in 1994. It has been a journey of the highest highs and debilitating lows. 

The earliest of early adopters, Kiciński was nine years old when he began his four-year quest to save the $75 needed to buy a gaming computer. This was back in the pre-Nintendo era of early 1980s Ataris—games on cassette, huge pixels, long loading times and pitiful graphics. “One dollar by one dollar I was gathering money,” Kiciński recalls. “I got [money] from my first communion … some money from [an] uncle.” His grandmother also gave the boy part of her life savings.

His love of gaming quickly paid off. In 1988, Kiciński made pocket money in Warsaw’s video game grey market, copying games on his father’s cassette recorder (later on floppy disk) and selling them at a local stall. “Every weekend,” he says, “I made more money than my parents [did] for a whole month.”

That same year, Kiciński met Iwiński at Czacki high school in central Warsaw, where neither had great grades. “The more I was interested in computers,” Kiciński admits, “the less I was interested in school.”

By 1994, Kiciński decided it was no longer worth selling bootleg games because a new copyright law had made it illegal. “I sold all of my equipment,” he says, “I said goodbye to all of my friends [employees]… I was happy. It was the first time for a long time that I had free weekends.”

By then, gaming had made some fairly significant leaps forward. Iwinski bought a CD drive to play the bigger, bolder 3D-games, and Kiciński still remembers seeing the new technology in action and realizing its potential.  

Kiciński got to work importing legitimate games from around the world and selling them at a big profit. “After two to three months selling the CD-ROMs,” he says of his partnership with Iwiński, “we decided to form a company.” 

The startup costs for CD Projekt Red were not exactly impressive. “I put my PC computer into the company,” Kiciński says, “Marcin put $500 into the company.” Working from a small room in a friend’s apartment, the duo developed relationships with U.S. publishers, such as American Laser Games which made popular games like Mad Dog McCree and Who Shot Johnny Rock? 

Within five years, Kiciński and Iwiński found what they believed was the Next Big Game: Baldur’s Gate, developed by Canadian company BioWare and published by Interplay Entertainment. They chose wisely. CD Projekt  had grown close to the game’s publishers and brought in Polish voice actors to do the local dubbing. Baldur’s Gate also marked the turning point in which CD Projekt found a way to beat the pirates since customers were willing to pay just $10-$13 more for CD Projekt’s game to get all the extra “goodies.” The invisible hand had found its way to the gaming keyboard.

Baldur’s Gate brought in more than $600,000 in sales for CD Projekt in its first week. Poland was on the map with gamers and CD Projekt took the next logical step. “We had a dream of making our own games from the very beginning,” Kiciński says. “We knew that it was complicated, we knew it was money consuming. And we had no expertise.”

Although CD Projekt lacked game developing know-how, Kiciński and Iwiński believed they had found another perfect vehicle for their nascent company: The Witcher, an elaborate fantasy world based on the novels of Poland’s favorite literary curmudgeon, Andrzej Sapkowski.

“After Witcher 1,” Kiciński says, “the dev team grew so the burning rate was significant.”

Once again, Kiciński and Iwinski had flawless instincts. The Witcher series, which launched in 2007 has sold some 50 million units across three games, with The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt considered one of the greatest video games of all time, selling more than 28 million copies.

But it all nearly went horribly wrong. The financial crisis in 2009 was particularly devastating for CD Projekt Red, which had to lay off nearly half of its 350 employees. “There was a huge cash flow problem,” Kiciński explains, “it was very difficult to pay salaries.” Eventually Kiciński helped CD Projekt find an investor, Zbigniew Jakubas. The cofounders agreed to give up 22% of the company in exchange for the financing needed to get the games produced—an estimated $4 million. The following year, a reverse merger with IT firm Optimus SA via a SPAC put the studio on the Warsaw stock exchange with little fanfare in December 2010.

By the time The Witcher 2 was released in May 2011, Kiciński was severely burned out. Although the game was a critical and commercial success, Kiciński was recovering from a broken leg and Lyme disease, and looking for the exit. “After Witcher 1,” he explains, “the dev team grew so the burning rate was significant.” 

The team had started developing two Witcher games simultaneously in the heart of the financial crisis. The dev teams went to work on Witcher 2 but the old tech had lots of limitations and faced similar functionality problems that plague Cyberpunk 2077. “Basically, we focused all our energy and resources on bringing Witcher 2 to the market,” Kiciński says.

It was at this point that Kiciński started planning his exit and thinking about his legacy. He built the production house that would develop Witcher 3 and eventually lead to CD Projekt’s next role-playing game franchise: Cyberpunk 2077, based on Mike Pondsmith’s RPG franchise.

But Kiciński had finally had enough of the warp-speed schedule required to produce a video game worthy of the lucrative Witcher series—he would not stick around to lead the Cyberpunk 2077 build. Within the industry, CD Projekt Red was notorious for burning out its employees in the final months of production, known as “crunch.” Given the pressure to produce another blockbuster game, Kiciński understood that the only way to meet the unforgiving deadlines was to cut corners and fix the glitches after launch. Such flaws in the production pipeline would eventually become disastrous for Cyberpunk 2077, but Kiciński left that for others to solve. “Once the company got stable,” he says, “I felt confident I could leave.”

Over its protracted development period, Cyberpunk 2077 milked for every droplet of hype it could find. Its biggest pre-launch triumph was scoring Keanu Reeves as the game’s frontman. In the final months of development, despite delaying the release by several months, the pandemic provided a rare opportunity for success. With the entire slate of big-budget movies shelved in 2020, there couldn’t have been a better time to release a video game with such exceptional pedigree. 

To launch in time for holiday shopping this year, corners were cut, which lead to numerous bugs, including the infamous penis glitch.

Over the summer, analysts predicted that Cyberpunk 2077 could sell north of 25 million units in the first year, which, at around $60 per game, would result in a record revenue year for the company. (In 2015, the year Witcher 3 was released, CD Projekt rang up $213 million.)

But in the months before its release, much of the good will built around the game had evaporated. After several delays in Cyberpunk 2077’s launch—the date moved from April to September to November—before landing on December 10. CD Projekt Red reportedly intensified the crunch—including 6-day work weeks—to meet the final deadline.

To launch in time for holiday shopping this year, corners were cut, which lead to numerous bugs, including the incompatibility with older consoles and the infamous penis glitch, which has drawn the ire of transgender advocates. Several analysts told Forbes that the expectation was for CD Projekt Red to alternate releases of a new Cyberpunk and a Witcher game every two-and-a-half years, with revenue-generating downloadable content (extra playable stories priced around $20) sandwiched in between. With the extra time now needed to fix the problems with Cyberpunk 2077—and to avoid making the same mistake again with the next release—that calendar has likely been abandoned.

After Kiciński walked away from CD Projekt Red in 2013, Iwiński became the public face of the company, working alongside Kiciński’s older brother, Adam, who joined as its first employee in 1994 and now serves as president and co-CEO.

Today Michał Kiciński helps run Mudita, a hardware company that designed a simple, high-end smartphone alternative to help those suffering from an “overflow of information” and “addictive patterns.” The phones are set for release in April 2021. He has invested around $87 million from some CD Projekt shares he has sold since 2011 and owns 49% of the new company. And his optimism remains as confident as ever.

“This phone,” he says, “is like Witcher 1.”

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