In an ambitious move, the acclaimed Polish game developer and publisher behind hits like The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 has set its sights on accelerating the release cadence for its major AAA titles going forward.
During CD Projekt Red’s recent Q1 2024 earnings call, joint CEO Michał Nowakowski laid out the company’s plans to make its launch schedule “less lumpy” by having multiple large-scale projects in simultaneous development.
Nowakowski pointed to CD Projekt’s recent experience working on the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty in parallel with the next mainline Witcher game, codenamed Polaris, as an example of the studio’s increasing bandwidth.
“We already worked on two projects at the same time when we worked on [Phantom Liberty] because that was a game-sized project with almost 300 people working on it, and at the same time we have already been working on Polaris,” he explained.
Indeed, the company has rapidly expanded its development workforce to a sizable 630 employees as of April 30th, with the vast majority dedicated to Polaris which is intended to launch a new Witcher trilogy.
However, Polaris and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2 being developed at CD Projekt’s Boston studio are just two of the company’s active AAA projects. Nowakowski also namechecked the mysterious “Project Sirius”, another Boston team collaborating with The Molasses Flood, and even a remake of the original Witcher game outsourced to Canis Majoris.
“You can definitely expect us to release more titles, and the cadence of launches is something we definitely plan to increase,” Nowakowski stated, though he remained tight-lipped on specific release timing for the company’s stacked pipeline.
For a developer once notorious for years-long gaps between its blockbuster RPG launches, CD Projekt Red’s new multi-project approach backed by an enlarged workforce signals a strategic shift towards capitalizing on its major franchises at an accelerated pace.
As CD Projekt proves it can successfully juggle this bounty of simultaneous AAA productions, fans of The Witcher, Cyberpunk, and the company’s other major IPs could potentially see new releases arrive more frequently than prior generational gaps.
Of course, the scale and complexity of CD Projekt’s ambitions also raise questions about sustainable development practices learned from Cyberpunk 2077’s rocky launch. But under new leadership and with the Witcher IP’s bright future ahead, the revamped studio appears determined to fire on all cylinders in pursuit of becoming a well-oiled AAA heavyweight.
