CD Projekt Red, the publisher and developer of The Witcher and Cyberpunk, wants to release major games more frequently. The rapidly expanding company revealed its ambitious plans during its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday (thanks, VGC), intending to make its release schedule "less lumpy".
If you take expansions out of the picture, CD Projekt's list of core releases has been The Witcher (2007), The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020). During the call, the company was asked whether it could simultaneously focus on multiple large games. Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said that was already the case: "We already worked on two projects at the same time when we worked on [Cyberpunk 2077 DLC] 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, so we’ve had an experience of working on more than one project."
In fact, as of 30th April, CD Projekt now employs a sizable staff of 630 developers, with the vast majority working on Polaris, the next Witcher game. As is the way of the corporate world, we were even blessed with a graph showing how the staff is currently allocated.
Nowakowski reiterates what the company has on the docket: "We are working on more than one project at this time as well. Cyberpunk 2 is being developed in Boston, and Polaris is being developed predominantly in Europe. We have other projects with other teams like Project Sirius and also in Boston with The Molasses Flood. The Witcher 1 remake is also done in cooperation with Canis Majoris, so you can expect us to release more titles. We plan to increase the cadence of launches. However, I will not comment on the space between the projects time-wise.”