Isn’t this the guy who was a dick about copyright to his work concerning derivatives? I remember someone saying that either for the games or for the movie they had to fight to retain licenses because he was acting up about it.
Yeah, if I remember correctly. He sold the rights straight up to the developers of the game, no royalties or percentage or anything because of his anti-game bias, then when the game was successful and that decision bit him in the ass, he tried to change the deal and get more money out of them. As I understand it he lost and still receives no revenue from the games.
Even then they’re still benefitting him tremendously because while he was popular in Poland, it’s the games that have really made his work popular overall, and people are buying his books and all because of it.
This article says he settled with CD project https://www.vgr.com/cd-projekt-witcher-lawsuit-author-sapkowski/
Everything I’ve read about the author does not paint him in a positive light. He seems crochety
From what I understand CDPR purchased the licensing for the Witcher IP a long time ago. At the time the Witcher was not popular outside of Poland so they didn’t have to pay very much. Since then they made the series really popular and the English translation brought it to a much wider market. So he felt like he wasn’t fairly compensated for his IP.
I think they’ve reached new agreements since then but it wasn’t easy for either party to reach agreement.
