Development on Project Polaris – or The Witcher 4, as everyone outside of CD Projekt would prefer to call it – is expanding in a major way as Cyberpunk 2077 winds down, according to the company’s latest financial report.
While we don’t have hard numbers on how many developers are working on each project, a graph in the company’s latest financial results presentation shows that the development team on The Witcher 4 has dramatically expanded in recent months, just as a development on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty has apparently begun to wind down.
During a Q&A with investors, CEO Adam Kicinski confirmed that once Phantom Liberty is out, “we’ll transfer a big part of the team to [Witcher 4]. Some members will be moved onto [Cyberpunk] Orion or [original IP] Hadar, but we will also be supporting Phantom Liberty after launch.”
The expansion of Witcher 4 development also comes alongside shrinking investment in Gwent, Project Sirius (whose third-party developer recently suffered layoffs amid a project restructure), The Witcher: Monster Slayer (which was recently canceled), and The Witcher 3’s next-gen upgrades.
At least, that’s what this graph makes it look like. Without hard numbers on dev team sizes, it’s tough to guess at CDPR exact business strategy, but at least we’ve got an idea of what the studio’s relative investment in each of its projects looks like. Here’s hoping that the studio’s next resource reallocation doesn’t involve any massive layoffs, as with the 100 employees who were let go earlier this year due to what CDPR called overstaffing.
There are a lot of upcoming CD Projekt Red games on the horizon, though it’ll be several years before we even know what many of them are. One thing’s for sure, though: there’s a lot more of The Witcher in our collective future.
Phantom Liberty is looking like much more than an expansion.
