‘Cyberpunk, ‘Witcher’ Studio doesn’t believe in microtransactions in single player games

There is constant contention between players and publishers when a new single player game is released at full price and also contains microtransactions. Games that do this are condemned, recently Dragon’s Dogma 2, previously many Ubisoft games and games that are not praised, Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate, Spider-Man, etc.

Now, CDPR is I’m just saying it straightthat he doesn’t think single-player games should have microtransactions like his previous titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 didn’t. They just had big (huge!) paid expansions added in time or smaller, free DLC .

See what CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz had to say in a interview with StockWatch.pl (Via Insider-Gaming):

“We do not see a place for microtransactions in the case of single-player games, but we do not rule out that we will use this solution in the future in the case of multiplayer projects.”

Multiplayer games are a different breed. Free-to-play MP games with microtransactions are the new norm at this point, and there are debates about what’s being sold and at what price. In this case, it seems that CDPR would agree that it should be headed in this direction for multiplayer content.

There have been strong hints that the next Cyberpunk game, codenamed Orion, will have some sort of online multiplayer component that will join a regular single-player campaign. That initially seemed to be the plan with 2077, but instead years of fixes and improvements took precedence. But it’s easy to imagine that next time, CDPR might want to emulate GTA V(VI) and GTA Online to create a multiplayer world within Night City. And then they would probably sell stuff.

It’s a good rule of thumb that single player games should not have microtransactions. There’s always the “who does it hurt??” argument, but this gets into murky territory as you wonder if XP is off or items are limited in the game based on trying to sell things to players. And generally speaking, the individual players with the highest praise we see are almost always the ones who avoid microtransactions altogether. It’s quite a long list at this point, as most publishers seem to agree with CDPR, although some continue to push their luck.

I’m very curious about what multiplayer Cyberpunk will look like. We also know that CDPR is developing a separate, new IP alongside The Witcher, and I’d be a bit surprised if it wasn’t a multiplayer thing. But we’ll see (in a few years).

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