MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
A new report from the Polish games industry shows that it’s going from strength to strength, even without its biggest player – CD Projekt Red, creator of The Witcher games and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077.
Between 2016 and 2019 the industry grew its revenues at around 28 per cent per annum. Those figures remove the influence of the triple-A developer, whose own income tends to skew the results based on its release schedule. Totalled together the industry’s revenue has grown impressively from €304m in 2016 to €479m in 2019.
The report states that there are now 440 development studios in Poland with an impressive 9,710 people working in game production. It’s quite a fluid industry, with 120 studios closing down since 2017, while 160 new ones have been established.
39 per cent of all studios have five or fewer people, 40 per cent employ 6 to 16, with only 10 per cent having 40 or more, and only ten having over 200. Between all those studios, they create 480 new releases per annum
Those releases centre largely around the PC market, though a large spike in Switch titles (most ports) meant it saw the highest number of games produced in Poland in 2019, with 133 titles (of which 109 were ports), pushing it above the steady 100-odd PC titles launched a year. Polish-made Xbox One and PS4 releases were both around 25 a year.
On the other side of the coin there are 16m gamers in Poland with a consumer market pegged at $596m. As with most gaming markets, the audience isn’t particularly slavish about consuming homespun titles, with 96 per cent of industry revenue coming from outside the country.
The report was published by the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development with help from the Games industry Conference – you can read the whole thing here.
