CD Projekt has big plans — and admits not everyone will forgive Cyberpunk 2077
CD Projekt has laid out an ambitious ten-year roadmap covering a new Witcher trilogy, a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, a remake of the original Witcher, and an entirely new IP called Hadar — but its co-CEO is openly acknowledging that the catastrophic 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077 cost the studio some players permanently. With Cyberpunk 2077 now at 35 million copies sold, the numbers look good — the question is whether goodwill can keep pace.
The honest audit
Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski told the Knowledge newsletter that the Cyberpunk 2077 launch was "gut-wrenching" for the team. He admitted the reputational damage may never fully heal — some players, he said, have lost faith in the studio indefinitely. That's a notably candid statement from a company whose 2025 revenue grew 9% to 867 million PLN (roughly $200 million), with net profit up 33.7% to 595 million PLN — all without a single major new game release. Per Nowakowski on incomplete redemption, the studio believes its lessons have been learned, but it isn't declaring victory.
The Witcher 4 is the next big test. CD Projekt has roughly 513 developers on the project — approximately double the size of The Witcher 3's team — and is building it on Unreal Engine 5 rather than its in-house REDengine, which struggled badly on last-gen consoles at launch in 2020.
What's actually coming and when
The Witcher 4 won't arrive before 2027, and some reports point to 2028 as more realistic. Before that, a third expansion for The Witcher 3 — Songs of the Past — is due in 2027. The second and third entries of the new Witcher trilogy are planned to follow within six years of The Witcher 4's release, though CD Projekt says players shouldn't expect large-scale DLC in the style of Blood and Wine alongside each game.
Cyberpunk 2 (internally called Project Orion) is in early development and won't arrive before 2030 at the earliest. The new Hadar IP is earlier still — details remain undisclosed.
Nowakowski also pushed back on AI-generated game development, saying CD Projekt won't hand creative control to generative models even as he acknowledged fully AI-made games are coming from other studios. For a company still rebuilding trust after 2020, that's a deliberate signal — quality over speed, even if it means years between releases.
