Half-Life: Alyx Doesn't Scare CD Projekt Red

CD Projekt Red basically owned 2020 - while there were plenty of people excited about games like Doom Immortal and Watch_Dogs Legion, no game loomed quite as large as Cyberpunk 2077. The hype around that title is enormous, and investors were fairly confident that even If it wasn’t one of the “live service” games most developers won’t shut up about, it was going to be game of the year, easily.

That all changed once Valve decided to announce Half-Life: Alyx – and what’s more, release it a full month, in March, ahead of Cyberpunk 2077. There’s plenty of good reason to be worried that maybe CD Projekt Red has some real competition, but in a recent earnings call, vice president of business development at CD Projekt Red, Michal Nowakowski, assured their investors that there was literally nothing to be worried about. A new Half-Life doesn’t mean the end-of-life for Cyberpunk at all.

"The only reason I can think of why has Valve has decided to actually put this title in the market is because they actually have a corporation on the hardware side of the things. This is probably a big effort for them to sort of try to expand that. That niche is very, very, very—and I could add a few 'verys' here—small."

"So from the market perspective, are we afraid? No, because it's a very different niche. It's—this is an endeavor to sort of try to push the hardware while we are really targeting the mass markets where it is, which is major consoles and the PCs without the need to have the VR gear."

That is all very fair. Even more fair when he continued to say that the likelihood for Half-Life: Alyx somehow sparking a VR revolution was also super low, since the best games in the world won’t change the fact that a a good VR set is twice as expensive as a next-gen console.

So they’re not worried, but who knows? Anything can change in four months.