Michal Kicinski and Marcin Iwinski are living proof that playing a lot of computer games is not necessarily the waste of time that many parents maintain. The two school friends have taken their love of games and turned it into a business, CD Projekt, Poland’s largest video game distributor. In October, it released its first in-house game, The Witcher, featuring a lank-haired mutant assassin hero wielding a massive sword, which has sold about 400,000 copies around the world in its first month on the market.

“We started as a middleman, buying game licences and translating them and selling them on,” says Mr Kicinski. “But we decided we had to become producers as well.”