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With work on Cyberpunk 2077 winding down post-Phantom Liberty and more resources now being shifted to The Witcher 4, CD Projekt Red hopes to expand its development operations to a scale "not precedented in the history of our company."
That's straight from CFO Piotr Nielubowicz, who discussed the studio's ambitions during an earnings conference earlier today. Asked how CDPR will distribute revenue following the year which has now seen the company's best-ever third quarter on the back of Phantom Liberty, Nielubowicz explained:
"We definitely want to continue with developing games and with investing into them. We want to do it at a scale that was not precedented in the history of our company, working on a few projects at the same time – something that we've never made at this scale, historically."
This tracks with the many upcoming CD Projekt Red games announced at a mammoth earnings call last year. The news included the establishment of a Boston-based North American studio for CDPR which will shepherd the Cyberpunk franchise going forward and become key to the studio's ambitions for parallel AAA development. For clarity, the two big parallel projects in question are Cyberpunk 2077 sequel Project Orion and The Witcher 4 (Project Polaris until we get more than a working title).
However, CDPR has also seen a number of layoffs this year, with management attributing the cut of some 100 devs to overstaffing. In October, studio staff pushed to unionize following a third wave of layoffs.
CDPR CEO Adam Kiciński touched on the studio's plans in a bit more depth in response to a separate question regarding company priorities going into 2024. "Polaris is one of our top priorities," he began. "But we have to bear in mind that we are in parallel development for some time, and that's a strategy goal, to be able to develop AAA games [in parallel]. As Polaris is high priority, building the team in North America for Cyberpunk is the same priority."
"We are also working on other projects besides video games within our franchises. We have nothing to announce at the moment but we've been working on this for quite a while and the time will come to share some insights about this." This was swiftly followed by an odd question about Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 2, which Kiciński couldn't help but laugh at.
"And of course, The Molasses Flood will continue to develop Project Sirius with some direction," the CEO continued, referring to the externally developed, now-rebooted Witcher spinoff. "And [The Witcher remake] Canis Majoris, a very special project. We know the game very well because it's The Witcher 1, but at the same time we want to remake it with all the new technology and designs that we are preparing for Polaris."
The Witcher 4 is now CD Projekt Red's priority, with roughly half of the dev team working on the RPG.
