CI Games CEO Talks DEI in Gaming, Exclusivity, Body Type Selection, and More – An Interview by Vara Dark

Pleasing a core audience should not be difficult for entertainment companies. They simply need to focus on making great games instead of corporate activism and gamers will show up in droves to support them. In an industry where many prioritize virtue signaling over quality, CI Games has taken the opposite approach.

Since early 2025, this shift has made waves, reaffirming the company’s commitment to its players rather than fleeting trends.

Recently, the company made headlines for this very decision. While many gamers praised the studio for prioritizing player feedback, the response from gaming media was unsurprisingly critical. Outlets like Polygon and IGN have already started framing the move as “regressive” rather than recognizing it as a commitment to creative freedom.

I had the privilege of hosting a live, hour-long discussion with CI Games CEO Marek Tymiński, where we delved into the team’s dedication to crafting immersive titles like Lords of the Fallen and Sniper Ghost Warrior, their recent community polls, and how they’re actively implementing fan feedback.

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Vara Dark: How are things going for the Lords of the Fallen team? And how are, I’m not necessarily just saying business wise, but also culture wise, how is everybody in the team doing?

Marek Tyminski: We’re doing well. We had the last launch in 2023 that was obviously Lords of the Fallen back in October, and since that time, we worked hard improving some of the issues we had with the previous game. And so far, I think we have over 50 updates. Two Lords of the Fallen launch in 2023. It’s a lot and we’re still going, and we still have some really important updates to come in the next couple of months. And 2.0 is coming in March. And from, pretty much from the beginning of last year, we started to work on the next game, the next Lords of the Fallen title. And the full production on that, on the title has been going since the summer of last year.

Vara Dark: I remember reading last year that there were reports about exclusivity. I don’t think that they were ever confirmed, but there was talk about potential Epic exclusivity for the sequel. I don’t know if you can confirm that.

Marek: Yes, absolutely. So I can confirm Epic is our exclusive partner for the PC version of the game, and we really appreciate working that close with Epic, and I believe we can have a better game coming out of that, and there’s a lot of support from these guys. And we were close, and obviously we use Unreal Engine 5. It’s very advanced technology, and it’s kind of new, still very new. And I think this is for the benefit of players, and not just on the PC platform, but it’s a benefit for everyone on all platforms that the game will be available. So really looking forward to that.

A screenshot from the trailer for Lords of The Fallen – YouTube, Gamespot

Vara: I know people are kind of mixed on platform exclusivity. Is there a specific reason you decide to go with Epic? Have you worked closely with them before?

Marek: I mean, on one side, you know, we very close to them by having that business relationship. But at the same time, you know, Epic have quite a lot of other exclusive games, and that’s usual in this industry. And we said that, we made it public once we signed the contract, that there’s also certain advance, a certain fee they will be paying to us before the game is launched. So that is also really helpful, from the standpoint of, you know, financing part of the of the development of that game.

Vara: Recently there have been so many people talking about the game (Lords of the Fallen), and a big reason why is because of the statement that you and the team made, committing yourselves to just making great products first and dropping any sort of DEI commitments. There was a little bit of a mixed reaction, because I felt like a lot of gamers were very happy to hear this, but the mainstream media, in fact, was upset that this happened. I’m not very surprised, and I’m sure many other people aren’t. But to quote PC Gamer, they said that you were “embracing fear of the DEI boogeyman,” and that you’ve done this “to stir up lizard brain emotions on the way to generating views.” That of course, is ridiculous. But is there any worry that you guys are now like a target by the mainstream media?

Marek: Look, we are a publicly listed company in Warsaw stock exchange. So obviously we are reporting to investors. And that last event was an investor chat. So we had an investor chat with probably almost all Polish investors, and that chat was in English, as I had also Tom, who is the Senior VP of development, and Ryan, who is the Head of Brand Marketing. So that chat was for investors. And, you know, I think it was like 400 people live on that chat, and then probably total of 1,000 investors read that chat. Obviously, we always have in those statistics. I think that chat was early January. That chat was, I think, Wednesday, and then Friday, end of the day. Our time in Europe, we saw those articles, and it was, yeah, it was, it was disappointing, because it’s not what we meant, and we didn’t try to make it like a public statement and but yeah, but then I saw also someone on X, Pirat_Nation, saying we are “dropping the DEI” from our games.

A poll from Marek Tyminski of CI Games on Gender selection in medieval RPGs – X, @tyminski_marek

READ: CI Games CEO Banned From Lords of The Fallen Subreddit Group for Catering to What Players Want

We never really had that much DEI to begin with. I said exactly, that’s what we will do, whatever works. I used on that tweet, and that got super viral. And I saw a lot of really great, positive comments around that, but also quite a lot of negative and some of them really nasty. I’ve been watching social media for 20 years, so I’m aware of that. I’m used to that. But it didn’t really make sense from the racial standpoint. Because what we’ve seen, you know, we see things. We use different tools we have a lot of data right, coming from not only our products from but from other products so we see what’s happening. And then, you know, somebody said, okay, you know, what about those body types? Why you have them? And I responded, let me look into that. And then I decided, like, why not? Why don’t we make the poll? Because we understand that this is not what people want. But like, let’s make the poll on X. That is the huge, huge, huge channel. I mean, it’s probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, right?

And we did that. We saw the numbers of almost 50,000 votes. And almost 90% wanted to have male and female. And once I had that poll, I said that we would follow whatever the results would be. And that’s what we did. We just didn’t do it on the next game that we will have next year, but we also did that on the game that we launched in 2023 and I think it was fair to. We wanted to show the commitment to people that we really actually doing that because we believe this is the right thing to do. That just all happened organically, I think for the benefit of our company, for our studio, but also I think for the benefit of a lot of other studios that I can imagine will follow that. But it was never an easy decision. And I had different stories like, “don’t do it” and all the consequences and risks and all stuff but they were the right decisions. But look. The media should write about games and just focus on games. And I think you know, that everyone knows that their business is writing about games that their audiences wanted to hear and read. And I think you know, no matter what we do, and how much we will go into players first approach and dropping DEI from our from our games, we have to still deliver great games in the future was the next one is Lords of the Fallen 2. Our focus is absolutely on that. And I believe that when we have a great product coming next year, we will have also traditional media willing to write about it and speak about it, because the game will speak for itself.

Korean devs don’t have to follow DEI rules created by the West. Creators have more freedom, and when you add top-tier quality… boom, global hits. Interesting. https://t.co/GGpSmDHtcm

— Marek Tyminski (@tyminski_marek) February 10, 2025

Vara: Was there a specific reason, that you know of, that Body Type A/B was initially chosen? Was it a team decision, was it something that was well thought out or was it done with intention?

Marek: No, it was intentional. That decision was made a couple of years ago and the industry a couple of years ago was an industry that you’d want to be DEI in terms of at least having some values in terms of that. Just to be able to be attractive to talent and that’s connected, right? At the same time, that was the industry standard. Body Type A/B was the industry standard around games, especially Souls games. So yes, probably we don’t like that, we didn’t like that the most but it was the industry standard and if you do something different then that meant risk or maybe substantial risk because there was this outset industry outside of our organization that would just stay there. That’s what is expected from you as a developer, not just speaking about us. I think you build the studio, the project from scratch and from 0, people being on the project there’s a little bit of things that you bring into that and I think it’s normal you want to reduce risks especially in this environment. That was that kind of like having a social pressure on it. So you don’t want to pick up battles where you don’t need to pick up battles. And I think that was the thing. Later on the situation had drastically started to change a year to a year and a half ago in regards to DEI. I think if you look at even the last poll, that is a strong demonstration what people want. From the time standpoint you could say it was a mistake, but it’s hard to say it was just pure mistake because of the reasons I said. But we believe the industry is different, at least to a degree different than it was, and it’s the right time to make that change back and give players what they want and I think that’s why we did that, right?

And we will stick to that on next projects as well. But just to be fair, it’s a very sensitive topic. DEI is a very sensitive topic, especially for people like us. We have very diverse teams like I explained to you we have people in different countries all around Europe, most of them in the Western Europe, in the Southern Europe, and they are different races, different sexual orientations. So we’ve been always very welcoming to people as they are and who they want to be, and just feel free to be themselves when they’re working for the company. And we absolutely were always committed to that, and we are absolutely committed to that now as well. We always in reality were a company that had that best talent policy. People know that we are authentic, who are working for us, they feel that we are and they see that we dropped that in October last year, and that was before the US election. So, and especially from the European standpoint, it didn’t look like Trump could win, you know, like from the Europeans when we were in Europe, right? And we did that because we strongly believe that’s the right thing to do, bringing the best talent. So and the same goes to players first like, just to be clear, we updated our strategy back in September 2024 where when said that. The player first approach is absolutely our key strategic point and we’ll be fully committed to that. And the players first is not just related to, you know, not pushing political and social agendas into games. It’s so much more than that.

How should attractive lead female characters look in an action RPG?

— Marek Tyminski (@tyminski_marek) February 4, 2025

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Vara: You mentioned about industry standards with male and female versus A and B, because you did say the industry standard now is kind of to go to A and B, but it used to be male and female. When do you think that shift really happened? Or why do you think that happened? Is it maybe just because it was more attractive to investors, or is it because of ESRB and rating boards? Because I know that that is also a big question that maybe you’ll have a little bit more insight into.

Marek: I think this is happening because of a bigger cultural shift. Video games are probably one of the best medium to do that, if this is your agenda right, and that’s political right. There are people saying “oh, but it was political, Now changing body type A and B to male and female.” I think, yes, it is political, but only to those who are considering pushing social and political agendas into games for them. To them, it’s political, but to everyone else. To vast majority of people, it’s nothing to do with politics. We have tools to measure sentiment, simple tools. And you can see product by product, game by game, how people talk, and what’s the sentiment, and how the sentiment is changing. People, players feel frustrated. They feel marginalized. You know, they want to play games in their favorite franchises, but they cannot get those games the way that they would like to play them. And at the same time you have publishers frustrated. But we are doing a lot of research. We’re listening to players. But then the question is, you know, I believe they do not like speaking for everyone.

There are different companies in the industry, no names, where I believe they do listen to players. But the question is, how selectively they listen to players. Are they listening like, and just asking, Hey, how about combat, how about this? But they’re not listening to feedback about narrative, how about the characters are, and then they get the feedback from their communities, on what they’re asking, but they’re not having the feedback across the board. (I believe he means implements) Like I said, the values, the diverse teams are all super important, but there is a very clear cut between the editorial decisions going to each game are purely based on what really we believe is best, and we’re checking that, checking that frequently with our communities, then looking at the industry. The industry, I remember 15, years ago and 20 was like, ‘let’s make cool things. Let’s make things that are coolest things we can have out of, you know, any given game.’ And then some ideas were great, some ideas were not so good, right? But it was kind of like ‘Let’s make something great, outstanding, cool’ again. And I think that started to shift, and not with every game, and not with every publisher.

Some said, ‘Don’t do it.’ Others doubted. Yet our Lords of the Fallen (2023) PS5 promo in Jan 2025 shattered expectations—40%+ above forecast and 20%+ over the Dec 2024 promo (same discount, daily comparison). 🤯🔥 Players First. #GamesForGamers

— Marek Tyminski (@tyminski_marek) January 31, 2025

But, you know, it started to shift five, eight years ago, you know, that towards more of that kind of, like, probably too much of that social and political things going to games. And like someone said, and I reposted that amplification, and some of the characters you can clearly see that wasn’t the direction. I had another poll about that, and you can clearly see, people want to have attractive lead characters. The vast majority, they want that. So what happened is that some of the other games haven’t had it. I think this is just another demonstration. But there is, there is some agenda. Politics should not be part of video games and, and we have to focus on making the best games we can. I’m not saying we will make the best game, you know, next year. What I can be committed to is that we’ll try to do the best we can with our teams. But that should be the focus.

For the full, unedited interview, check out Vara Dark on YouTube.

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