Witchers Should Not Kill Monsters

Managing problems is more profitable than solving them

Geralt of Rivia, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red

To the Esteemed Council of Witcher Schools,

It is no secret that the Witcher profession is on the decline. With few monsters and even fewer Witchers, killing monsters to protect people seems to be a dying business.

When you first engaged Oxenfurt Strategic Advisors to turn this situation around, I was candid about the secular industry headwinds our initial due diligence uncovered.

While those headwinds remain, our perspective has changed.

We must reimagine the Witcher profession as one that manages, rather than kills, monsters.

Root Cause Analysis: Structural Headwinds

Whenever a Witcher successfully kills a monster, there is one less reason for them to exist. Witchers work themselves out of their jobs.

From an economic perspective, this is called a perverse incentive, where solving a problem destroys all future revenue streams associated.

The Witcher profession faces an existential crisis of its own making.

Ceteris paribus, this would not be a problem. Killing monsters would simply remain a cottage industry, with respective Witcher schools operating as boutiques offering specialized services.

However, two macro-environmental trends disrupt this equilibrium:

1. Increasing human urbanization: 10 years ago, Novigrad was just a small trading port no bigger than a village. Now, it occupies 73% of the Pontar Delta and is one of the largest cities in the North. As human civilization expands, there will be no spot left in the North undiscovered or untamed

2. Declining monster populations: the Conjunction of Spheres happened some 1,500 years ago. Since then, the monster population on the Continent has been on a continuous decline. In the past 5 years, monster sightings have decreased by 30-40% year-on-year (negative CAGR)

Together, these headwinds all but guarantee Witcher obsolescence unless there is a fundamental shift in the business model.

Strategic Recommendation: Business Model Pivot

We must transition the Witcher business model from one-time transactions (kill-based) to recurring subscriptions (ongoing threat management).

In other words, Security-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Witchers must never kill monsters again.

Tactically, this is what the shift looks like for a Witcher on the Path:

Before

1. Track monster e.g., griffin

2. Prepare for combat

3. Kill griffin

4. Get paid (one time)

After

1. Track monster e.g., griffin

2. Prepare for combat

3. Drive griffin away by injuring/maiming it (it is left alive)

4. Get paid (first time)

5. Griffin heals and returns

6. Repeat steps A-E

7. Get paid (recurring)

In both instances, the outcome is the same: people are saved from the monster and human lives are protected.

However, by managing the problem instead of solving it, Witchers get the twofold benefit of lower mortality rates (driving a monster away is significantly less dangerous than fighting it to death) while protecting future revenue (lifetime value (LTV) per monster increases by 10x).

Note: financial projections are included in the appendix. These include tier-based pricing for differentiated service levels. For modeling purposes, the Law of Surprise is excluded from all financial calculations.

This is a necessary pivot and one that we have guided many other clients, facing similar issues, to profitable and enduring success.

A lighthouse case study of ours is helping the Temple of Melitele disrupt itself: curing patients is not a sustainable business model.

Brand Repositioning

As with any change, big or small, controlling the narrative is key.

Based on preliminary testing with focus groups, framing this pivot as “Ecological Conservation” has tested extremely well with urban and rural stakeholders across all income brackets.

Witchers are no longer “Monster Slayers”. They are “Ecological Stewards”.

By managing monsters instead of killing them, Witchers now preserve the rich biodiversity which makes the North an ecologically vibrant ecosystem. They are conservation experts, not bio-engineered mutants born of human desperation and fear.

Monsters are a vital, irreplaceable part of the North’s natural fauna; killing them is barbaric and cruel.

As monster allies, Witchers never kill monsters. Instead, they use repeated, outcome-focused maiming that limits a monster’s ability to endanger human lives.

Of course, this means only Witchers should interact with monsters because only Witchers have the necessary expertise to safely do so. We are currently lobbying all Northern Kingdom lawmakers to criminalize all non-Witcher interactions with monsters. This means (not exhaustive):

• Banning sorceresses/sorcerers from killing monsters (professional malpractice)

• Making it illegal for communities to self-defend (unlicensed practice)

This protects the public by ensuring only trained professionals handle monsters on pain of death, since the punishment should be proportional to the crime (if the monster doesn’t kill the perpetrator, the judiciary will).

Future State: Supply Chain Security

Managing, not killing, monsters will provide a step-change unlock in revitalizing the Witcher profession.

However, at Oxenfurt Strategic Advisors, our dual mission is not just to solve problems but to manage them in their entirety. Thus, our final recommendation is to begin monster breeding programmes.

Without monsters, there would be no Witchers.

To ensure there will always be monsters (and Witchers), proactive monster population management is needed. By developing a safety stock of monsters across all types (e.g., draconids, necrophages, relicts etc), we future-proof the profession by solving the supply-side challenge of monster replacement fertility rates.

Monster management is not just about injuring them but also about cultivating them. Having private biodiversity reserves of monsters also advances the Witcher profession by:

1. Helping to train future Witcher aspirants

2. Driving biomedical research (e.g., mutagens, concoctions)

Guardrails must be established to ensure monster breeding is legal, ethical and regulated. We are currently drafting mutually beneficial frameworks for Northern Kingdom legislators e.g., approval in exchange for secondary monster use cases in military applications.

Proposed next steps:

• [Decide]: Go/No-Go for Witcher business model pivot by end of week

• [Discuss]: Monsters for pilot breeding programme

• [Inform]: Brotherhood of Sorcerers medical research partnerships

My team and I are available to walk through these findings and answer any questions via Xenovox at your earliest convenience.

Respectfully submitted,

Solas Khyron

Senior Partner, Oxenfurt Strategic Advisors

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