The Witcher: Monster Slayer

» see witchermonsterslayer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Spokko released it on 21 July 2021, worldwide, on both mobile platforms at once. It was a location-based augmented reality game on the Witcher license: you walked around your actual neighborhood and the game placed monsters in it, and you fought them by holding the phone up and aiming a crossbow at the pavement in front of you. Over half a million people installed it on Android inside three days.

Spokko was a Polish studio going back to 2008 that CD Projekt took a majority stake in during 2018, specifically to get mobile games out of its properties. Monster Slayer was the first one, and it was not a reskin of the obvious template. The bestiary was Witcher canon rather than a set of collectibles, and preparing for a fight meant reading what a creature was weak to and brewing the right oil before you engaged it, which is the actual loop of the books.

The design also leaned harder on the real world than most of these games did. Time of day was live, so the nasty things came out after sunset and the daytime bestiary was thinner. Weather fed in from wherever you actually were, so rain changed what you met. There were quests that only made sense in the dark and enemies you would never see if you played it on the walk to work.

That is a genuinely good idea and it is also a filter. Asking people to be outside at eleven at night in the rain, holding a phone up in front of their face, narrows your audience down to a shape that will not pay for a studio. Between launch and the closure announcement players killed more than a hundred million monsters, and that number was published as a farewell statistic, which is the only context in which a company ever publishes a number like it.

~ the case file ~

~ the part that was actually hard ~

I work on computer vision now, on hardware that has to see and decide without help from a data center, so this is the one category of dead game where I can read the engineering bill. Placing something convincingly in a camera frame on a mid-range phone from 2019 means running tracking and plane detection on a thermally limited chip while the screen is at full brightness and the radios are up. Battery is the real constraint, not the graphics. Every AR product of that generation was quietly fighting the same losing argument with a phone that got hot and died in forty minutes, and the games that survived the era mostly gave up on the camera and settled for a map.

~ current report 54/2022 ~

CD Projekt filed it as a regulatory announcement, current report 54/2022, which is how a public company says a game is dead. In-app purchases were switched off and the game was pulled from both stores on 31 January 2023, giving anyone still playing five months with no way to spend money and no way for a new player to join. The servers stopped on 30 June 2023.

The stated reason was that it had not reached business expectations, and the announcement pointed back at the strategy update CD Projekt had given in October, which was about concentrating on the core franchises. Spokko was absorbed into CD Projekt Red. Some of the team moved onto the main projects and some of them were let go, which the company said out loud in the same breath as the shutdown date.

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