The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt wouldn’t exist ‘as it is’ today without consoles

CD Projekt RED's co-founder Marcin Iwinski stepped forward to apologize for the disparity in graphics between The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's initial reveal in 2013 and the game that released.

While PC players have been targeting consoles as the reason for The Witcher 3's graphical "downgrade", claiming that without consoles the game would look better than it does now, Iwinski has said that without the Xbox or PlayStation we wouldn't have The Witcher 3 as it is today.

Without sales from the PlayStation and Xbox versions of the game, the sprawling open world that we have to explore in the game would not exist. CD Projekt RED would not have had enough money to create the world or test the limits of how big of a world they could create.

Iwinski explained it all very clearly, "If the consoles are not involved there is no Witcher 3 as it is. We can lay it out that simply. We just cannot afford it, because consoles allow us to go higher in terms of the possible or achievable sales; have a higher budget for the game, and invest it all into developing this huge, gigantic world.

There isn't a doubt that had CDPR developed for one platform the game would have appeared better graphically, but Iwinski drove the point home saying, "Developing only for the PC: yes, probably we could get more [in terms of graphics] as there would be nothing else – they would be so focused, like if we would develop only on Xbox One or PlayStation 4. But then we cannot afford such a game."

Read more from CDRP at Eurogamer.