Dear All,
We would love to be able to deliver the Spanish version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with full with voice-overs but, at this moment in time, it is simply impossible from the production point of view. Here’s how it works. When we plan to release a local, fully voice-overed language version of one of our games, the first thing we need to do is have a look at historical sales data for our games in a given region. Next, we take into account the recommendation of our partner for that specific market. We then take all the data, crunch it, and see if it makes sense from a financial perspective for us to go full VO (or even if it makes sense to localize the game at all). In the case of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the problem was even bigger, since the full voice-over localization of a game this huge is a gigantic and very expensive (think several hundreds of thousands of Euro just for the recordings and cast) process. When we juxtaposed the numbers with previous sales in Spain and forecasts we had for sales of the upcoming game, the result was that we would literally lose money on all the sales of the game we would make. While we are the first ones to say that money is not everything, we do have to pay the bills, and pay the salaries of all the people working on the game at the studio.
One thing worth mentioning is that our local partner DID come back to us with increased projections of sales for Spain and a recommendation to localize the game with full VO. However, that re-evaluation of the situation surfaced too late for us to be able to finish the process on time. It was with great sadness, but we had to drop the idea of full Spanish VO for the Wild Hunt. We assure you though--your voice was heard, and we will most definitely remember your feedback as we develop our future titles. We are really sorry and apologize if you are disappointed. However, we do hope you understand us as well.
With love,
CDP RED Team