As part of CD Projekt’s latest earnings briefing, the company made a number of key disclosures about its development pipeline, including a staffing update for its upcoming projects.
A slide from the Polish company’s earnings release shows the distribution of its developers on the studio’s numerous projects. As you can see in the graph below, CD Projekt has now assigned the majority of its developers to the next big Witcher game, which is codenamed Polaris.
For the latest quarter that ended on October 31, you can see that just under 50% of CD Projekt’s development staff (or 330 people according to IGN) are now working on The Witcher 4. The number of developers working on the game has increased since December 2022.
By mid-2024, CD Projekt expects to have more than 400 people working on the next Witcher game, CEO Adam Kicinski said, according to IGN. A number of developers are listed in the graph as being “in transfer,” and this could pertain to developers shifting to The Witcher 4 and other projects.
The Witcher 4, or whatever the game might be called, will be the first entry in the main series since 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. That game sold more than 50 million copies and is one of the top 10 best-selling games in history. It’s the first in a new trilogy.
Don’t expect to play The Witcher 4 anytime soon, though, as the game is not scheduled to release until 2025 at the soonest. It’s being made with Unreal Engine 5, which is a change from past entries in the series, which were developed using CD Projekt’s own proprietary RedEngine.
In addition to this game, CD Projekt is working on a new version of The Witcher 3 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, as well as a game codenamed Sirius that’s in development at CD Projekt’s Boston studio, The Molasses Flood. This game recently underwent an evaluation that led to a “new framework” for the title. CD Projekt laid off a number of staff as part of the move.
Beyond The Witcher, CD Projekt is making a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. For more on the studio, be sure to watch GameSpot’s in-depth documentary on CD Projekt and the redemption of Cyberpunk 2077.
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