CD Projekt Red now has more than 300 developers working on The Witcher 4
Nearly half of CD Projekt Red's development staff are in full production on the next Witcher game.
Last we heard something really concrete on the next Witcher game, it was in pre-production—that was what CD Projekt Red said about The Witcher 4, codename Polaris, back in early 2022. That's definitely not the case anymore judging by CD Projekt's latest earnings report, which shows that around half the studio's developers are now working on the Witcher sequel.
As spotted by IGN, CDPR's Q3 report indicates the game has moved into full development with some 300 developers working on the next Witcher RPG. "The team is steadily growing, having reached almost 330 developers at the end of last month," CEO Adam Kiciński said in an earnings call today. "It's expected to grow to over 400 by mid next year."
Kiciński said that the 220 developers marked as working on Cyberpunk 2077 by the report's October cutoff will soon be transitioning to other projects, including Polaris. Most of the rest, presumably, will be making their way onboard the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, which is also already early in production.
Despite the growing team committed to the Witcher sequel, it's not the only Witcher project in the works at CD Projekt. There's Project Serius, in development at former indie studio The Molasses Flood, acquired by CD Projekt last year. And there's also a remake of Geralt's first Witcher outing, which will be out sometime after Polaris.
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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
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