CD Projekt is a game industry powerhouse. After 10 years we still can't get enough of The Witcher 3, which reached 50 million copies sold in 2023 and it has the world on tenterhooks in anticipation for The Witcher 4.
Getting to this point has not been entirely smooth sailing, to say nothing of Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch—a game which eventually blossomed to its full potential and landed a spot in the PC Gamer Top 100 after travelling along an exceptionally bumpy road.
Today's CD Projekt is a rough diamond that came from challenging beginnings: Art director Paweł Mielniczuk tells us that when he joined CD Projekt Red in 2006, "there were like 60 people here and [we were] occupying two rooms in this building. There's this red room on the first floor [...] and that was the common center for all the Witcher games".
Mielniczuk said the seven years spent developing the first Witcher game came at great expense, financially and emotionally. "[CD Projekt Blue's] main business was publishing games, so a lot of people in CD Projekt Blue were really unhappy," Mielniczuk laughs. "[We were] like weird people [...] living in a cellar making some games, you know?" The assumptions were that "[CD Projekt Red] will never earn any money here" and that "This game, it's a total waste of time."
"So we had, you know, this ugly child of the company that nobody wanted until the Witcher 1 finally released after those seven years. And that was, I think, the breakthrough [...] because it instantly became very popular in Poland, [and most of] Europe."
Mielniczuk estimates that CD Projekt Blue was dismantled around the development of Witcher 3, integrating fully with Red—lifting their very own botchling curse and securing a second chance as a larger than life lubberkin.
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