CD Projekt

Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński started out in 1994 as a distributor in a country where piracy was the default. Their answer was lavish Polish editions at low prices, and the localisation of Baldur's Gate was the breakthrough. The development studio CD Projekt Red followed in 2002 and released The Witcher in 2007; the third game, in 2015, became one of the decade's most acclaimed RPGs.

The GOG store opened in 2008 selling old games with no copy protection at all – an unusual stance for a company that lived off game sales. Cyberpunk 2077 shipped in December 2020 in such a state that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store, and two months later a ransomware gang walked off with the source code. The game got fixed over time; the reputation took longer.