Cyberpunk 2077 has 400 people working on it

Being such big fans of The Witcher series, we’re pretty excited about Cyberpunk 2077. In a look back at the first quarter of the year, CD Projekt Red says more than 400 people are currently working on the game, which the company is preparing to showcase at this year’s E3 next month.

In a post summarizing its first quarter activity, CD Projekt hit on a couple business-related highlights. Sales of The Witcher 3 and its DLC remain the company’s biggest source of revenue, for instance.

“The CD Projekt Red studio carried on with intensive development of Cyberpunk 2077, with more than 400 people currently involved in the project,” the company said in the release.

That’s a potentially significant number. The in-house development team for The Witcher 3 eventually included about 240 developers, although there were about 1,500 people involved in that game’s global development and launch, all told.

The majority of the developers who worked on The Witcher 3 had shifted to Cyberpunk 2077 by late 2015, and the team has grown since then. 

Cyberpunk 2077 may indeed be an even more ambitious game than The Witcher 3, and that may partially account for the larger team. But CD Projekt Red has said it is adopting a new, more voluntary approach to crunch than it did with The Witcher 3, and that necessarily means hiring more people.

The release also notes that this year’s E3 may be the “most important fair in CD Projekt’s history,” so we’ll find out more about what they’ve all been hard at work on in a few weeks.