CD Projekt Red Creates Controversy With New Response to The Witcher 4 Criticism
CD Projekt Red has created a little controversy for itself after its latest response to The Witcher 4 criticism went viral. In roughly 24 hours, a reply from the official Witcher account on X has over 1.7 million views. To put this number into context, another recent reply from the same account, which is two days older, has less than 700 views. What did the official social media account for the CD Projekt Red series say that has the attention of the Internet? Technically, it said nothing. It replied with a meme, and this meme did not sit well with a segment of X. To this end, there are replies and quote tweets to the reply with tens of thousands of likes criticizing it.
So, what did The Witcher X account do that ruffled so many feathers? Well, first you need to backtrack. There has been controversy with the game from the start, stemming from Ciri being the protagonist instead of Geralt. In particular, the backlash was noteworthy enough — in particular the part focused on Ciri’s aesthetic “downgrade” — that CD Projekt Red addressed the criticism. All of this is simply to say, there’s been a controversy brewing with this game. In steps the now viral reply.
“Not Buying Witcher 4”
Replying to a generic social media post about The Witcher 3, a fan of the series replied with the following: “Witcher 3 was great. Not buying Witcher 4.” The fan did not elaborate, but for some reason this caught the attention of the official Witcher account, which replied with the following meme:
The reply earned 22,000 likes, so many have appreciated it, but many have not, as evidenced by everything mentioned above. Whether it’s a good approach to community building and marketing for the game to antagonize fans is certainly debatable. It probably isn’t, at least not for a huge game with nothing to gain from it. Whether a good approach or not, it’s undeniably attracted plenty of negative attention to a game that already was struggling with a bit of negativity. And video games, in particular, have proven recently that not all publicity is good publicity.
“Making fun of potential buyers is a great strategy that totally works,” reads one popular and sarcastic reply to the reply. Another adds: “Well, I was planning on buying it until you went out of your way to insult your own fan base with a Reddit-tier insult. So congratulations, you lost my purchase due entirely to your own actions.”
Will this individual and isolated X moment ultimately matter? Probably not, but it contributes to a larger narrative. And we’ve seen big games severely damaged, if not downright sunk, from accumulated negativity. We are actively seeing it right now with Marvel’s Wolverine.
The Witcher 3 is one of the best-selling games of all time, so it’s hard to imagine The Witcher 4 won’t sell a metric ton of copies itself. If the goal is to repeat this commercial success, though, that is hard to imagine. Between the protagonist change, all of the lost talent CD Projekt Red has suffered since 2015, and friction with fans, it’s actually impossible to imagine The Witcher 4 coming anywhere close to its predecessor in terms of success, which makes moments like this post a little puzzling. As another meme puts it, it’s a bold strategy, Cotton.
