Michał Kiciński helped co-found CD Projekt back in the heady days of 1994, meaning he's partially to thank for The Witcher 3 existing. While he hasn't played an active role at the studio for five years he's still a major shareholder, holding "almost" 11 percent of the company. So you'd expect him to have sunk a couple of hundred hours into The Witcher 3 by now, right? But here's the twist: he hasn't. He hasn't played the game at all.
Kiciński made the admission In an interview with Polish website Gazeta.pl (translation via reddit and Google Translate). Indeed, since he stopped actively working with the company, he's not missed being part of the games industry at all.
"Generally speaking, I don't miss it," he said. "If there's a small grain of nostalgia, I open up some strategy game on an iPad and that's good enough for me. It's not that I lost all interest in video games. I still like them, but now I have many more interests and activities which are more interesting than playing."
He said that while he used to spend a lot of time with Blizzard games and Counter-Strike, he deliberately phased them out. "Always, when I entered a video game world it completely disturbed my day-to-day life," he said. "I made a conscious decision that there are equally interesting things, even more interesting than games, that simultaneously make me feel better - physically, psychically and emotionally."
As for The Witcher 3, it's just too big – which is a sentiment even the most active of modern games enthusiasts can relate to. "There comes a moment, when you have to make a decision, how you want to spend that dozens of hours of your life. At this stage, at which I am right now, I believe that the real world is just more interesting than the virtual one, even though the latter can also be interesting and addicting."
Another interesting tidbit from the interview is how CD Projekt gained the trust of its audience. Kiciński believes pirates helped them get their attitude right, despite obviously being a financial hindrance. "We had to do everything to gain player's trust and offer them a product, that would be a better deal than a pirated copy. Our philosophy from the beginning was: pirate is just a mistreated client."
The full translated interview is over here, or if you read Polish, here's the original.
