Today, CD PROJEKT has released its earnings for the first half of 2024 while updating investors on the status of its main projects, chiefly The Witcher 4 (codenamed Polaris).
Michał Nowakowski, Joint CEO of CD PROJEKT, said:
Work on Polaris (The Witcher 4) is progressing – its development team is nearing a major milestone which will mark the end of the preproduction phase. The first half of the year was also a busy period for our Boston studio, which is laying the groundwork for Project Orion – a new game set in the Cyberpunk universe.
The Witcher 4 will enter production soon, then, and it will do so with 410 active developers, as shown in the latest infographics. CD PROJEKT as a whole gained nine employees in total between April and the end of July, with three additional developers on Polaris, four on Orion (the sequel of Cyberpunk 2077), three on Sirius (the rebooted multiplayer The Witcher spin-off in development at Molasses Flood).
The headcount on Project Hadar (a secret brand new IP) remains at 20, while three more developers are working on shared services across all projects, such as AI, localization, Quality Assurance, etc. Lastly, only eight developers have been assigned to other projects, down from twelve in April.
CD PROJEKT also commented on the recent launch of the REDkit for The Witcher 3. Nowakowski stated:
It’s been several months since our dev tools were released to gamers, and there’s already a slew of interesting modding projects out there. We are happy to see the engagement of the gaming community, which is eager to share its ideas, bringing new strength to The Witcher 3 – a game set to celebrate its 10th anniversary next year.
The Polish company’s financial results are quite positive. Its net profit (170 million in local currency, which translates to around $44 million) outperformed the comparative period by nearly 90%. CFO Piotr Nielubowicz also said:
In H1 2024 we also noted an increase in our financial reserves. Despite having paid out almost 100 million PLN in a dividend, and allocating over 150 million PLN to new projects, our reserves nevertheless grew by more than 55 million PLN.
There’s no release date for The Witcher 4 yet, but given the triple-A ambition, it’s easy to imagine at least two if not three years of production. As such, the game could launch between late 2026 and 2027.
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