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The developer of The Witcher 3 and online retailer Green Man Gaming have had a public falling out over the upcoming RPG.
CD Projekt Red’s business development manager Rafa? Jaki yesterday took to the studio’s forums to question the validity of GMG’s PC keys for the game, which are currently on sale for 32.49 – far less than the game’s 49.99 RRP.
Said Jaki: "I would kindly ask our fans not to buy via GMG at this time. We had not sold them keys and don’t know the origin of them."
In response, GMG CEO Paul Sulyok told Destructoid that having failed to reach an agreement with CD Projekt directly, the retailer was forced to source keys from other partners. He even went as far as to accuse CD Projekt of prioritising its GOG platform over supporting retail partners.
Green Man Gaming has an official contract with, and has been an approved retailer of CD Projekt products since August 11th 2011,” he stated. Following a six month dialogue with CDPR about the launch of The Witcher 3, we were disappointed that despite the offer of significant cash advances, and other opportunities to officially work together, CDPR chose not to engage with a number of significant, reputable, and successful retailers, including ourselves, as they instead focused on supporting their own platform GOG.
We believe that CDPR’s desire to support their own platform by working with retail outlets that would not conflict with their own is greater than that of meeting the demands of their audience, therefore we made the decision to indirectly secure the product and deliver it to our customers. To do this, we reached out to third parties and retailers that were approved by CDPR, to legitimately pass these keys onto our customers.
This means that at some point, revenue has been passed directly onto CDPR, and any additional discount on the title is absorbed by us, as we want as many people enjoying The Witcher 3 as possible. We would heartily welcome a renewed dialogue with CDPR, and are keen to continue to not only support the launch of The Witcher 3, but to keep celebrating and bringing the whole catalogue of CDPR titles to a worldwide audience, as we have done since 2011.”
In response Jaki returned to the forums to again question the source of the keys.
"We have worked with GMG in the past for W2 and they were a legit partner,” he conceded. "We control all digital and the codes, and because we decided not to sell keys to GMG it came as a surprise that they are doing a special promo without buying keys from us. We have reached out to ask for the source of the keys but up until now there was no response.
They might sell Nvidia keys (which are not to be sold but gifted with the Nvidia promo), or they just bough keys from GOG just like a regular customer and now they resell them with a loss (we cannot prevent anyone from selling something).”
In either event GMG are certainly not to be confused with some of the more shady key resellers that can be found online. Customers can be certain of the product on offer, so the only question they must ask themselves is how highly they value CD Projekt’s desire to maintain strict control of its RPG.
