CDP / CDP.pl

» see cdp.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Everybody knows the first half of this story. In 1994 Michał Kiciński and Marcin Iwiński founded a company in Warsaw to import and localize video games for a Polish market that had been running almost entirely on copied floppies. It was called CD Projekt. Years later part of it went off to make The Witcher and became one of the most famous studios in Europe.

The part that stayed behind kept doing the original job. It distributed computer and console games across Poland and translated a great many of them, and it is the reason a generation of Polish players got boxes in their own language instead of imports. It carried the biggest CD Projekt RED brands at home. It also moved into books, films, board games, audiobooks and comics, and in 2016 it started Klabater for independent titles, which became its own company listed on NewConnect in 2019.

The name changed as the shape did. The entity traded as CD Projekt sp. z o.o. from 1994 to 2012, became CDP.PL in 2012, and then in November 2014 the CD Projekt group sold the controlling stake in its local distribution company. From that point the distributor was a separate business from the studio sharing its origin, and the gap between their fortunes got wider every year.

~ the chronicle ~

~ selling its own name ~

In the spring of 2017 the company sold the thing it was named after. For three million złoty, Topmall sp. z o.o., part of Merlin Group, acquired the rights to the CDP.PL trademark and the cdp.pl and geezmo.pl domains, along with a license to use the store's software platform. The online shop went on trading under people who had bought the name off its inventor.

What was left was the distribution company, now called simply CDP, carrying on the business it had started in 1994 without the brand that business had been built under. Three years later that company went under and the store it used to own outlived it, which is not the usual order of things.

~ january ~

In January 2020 CDP went through mass layoffs. They came shortly after CD Projekt RED announced that Cyberpunk 2077 was being delayed, and CDP was the official Polish distributor for it. Several of the Polish outlets covering the collapse drew the obvious line between those two facts, and gram.pl put it outright: it looks like the postponement of Cyberpunk 2077's release date was the final nail in the coffin of the Polish distributor.

That reading is the writer's, not the court's. Neither the board's petition nor the ruling is quoted anywhere giving a cause, and a distributor that has already sold its storefront and is competing with digital download platforms has more than one way to run out of money. What the record supports is the order of events, and the four months between the layoffs and the filing.

~ the court in warsaw ~

On 21 April 2020 the board filed a bankruptcy petition. A month later, on 21 May, the Sąd Rejonowy in Warsaw granted it. "Sąd Rejonowy w Warszawie, korzystając z wniosku zarządu, ogłosił dzisiaj upadłość CDP." The court appointed a trustee, Krystian Tkacz, under judge Piotr Bartosiewicz, and the decision meant the start of the company's liquidation. Cenega picked up Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 in Poland.

cdp.pl does not resolve today. Merlin Group, which bought the name, hit its own insolvency proceedings later, and merlin.pl and cdp.pl stopped working together. So the brand and the business that created it died four years and one owner apart, both in Warsaw courts, while the studio that came out of the same 1994 office kept shipping. Twenty six years of putting other people's games on Polish shelves ended in a filing nobody outside Poland reported.

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