CD Projekt RED

Presentation

A white-haired witcher.

A war between kingdoms.

Contracts where the monster is not always the one you expected.

Then, a few years later, chrome implants, megacorporations, neon lights and a city promising to make all your dreams come true with the usual subtlety of a steamroller.

The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 seem to belong to completely different worlds.

Yet CD Projekt RED approaches both with the same obsession:

placing the player inside a world believable enough to make choosing uncomfortable.

The studio was founded in 2002 within the CD Projekt group, a Polish company created several years earlier around video game distribution.

At that point, CD Projekt RED had not released a single game.

It had no franchise of its own.

No famous engine.

No gigantic international team.

What it mainly had was an ambition that sounded simple and was considerably harder to achieve:

create its own RPG.

That first project would become The Witcher.

The universe came from the novels and short stories of Andrzej Sapkowski.

The game still had to find its own voice.

Two decades later, CD Projekt RED has become an international organization spread across Poland and North America, working simultaneously on several major productions.

The distance between those two moments is spectacular.

And sometimes painful.

Because the story of CD Projekt RED is not simply the story of a studio becoming bigger.

It is also the story of a studio repeatedly choosing projects slightly larger than anything it already knew how to make.

History

2002: moving from distribution to creation

The story actually begins before CD Projekt RED.

In 1994, Michał Kiciński and Marcin Iwiński founded CD Projekt in Poland. The company initially focused mainly on importing and distributing foreign software and video games on the Polish market.

But distributing other people’s games did not remain enough for long.

The founders wanted to create one themselves.

In 2002, a new company dedicated to development was established: CD Projekt Red Studio.

The transition mattered.

CD Projekt already understood the video game market.

Now it had to learn how to make the games themselves.

And for its first major project, the studio did not exactly choose the easy route.

The Witcher: four years learning the craft

In 2003, CD Projekt RED began developing The Witcher, an adaptation of the literary universe created by Andrzej Sapkowski.

The project was enormous for such a young team.

Development lasted around four years and gradually involved close to one hundred people.

The game was finally released on PC in 2007.

It was imperfect.

Sometimes rough.

Technically very much a product of its time.

But it already contained something the studio would preserve for years: a way of treating the RPG as a space for decisions rather than simply a sequence of quests.

Geralt’s world willingly refuses clean answers.

Humans can be more dangerous than the creatures they hunt.

A reasonable decision can sometimes produce unpleasant consequences.

And choosing between two solutions regularly means deciding which one seems least bad.

CD Projekt RED was not simply building its first game.

It was beginning to understand what kind of RPG it wanted to make.

The Witcher 2: learning to build its own technology

After the first game, the studio developed a far more ambitious sequel.

For The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, released on PC in 2011, CD Projekt RED created its own engine: REDengine.

The decision was significant.

The studio no longer wanted to control only its content.

It also wanted greater control over the technology making that content possible.

The Witcher 2 became more spectacular, denser and far more accomplished visually.

But one of its most interesting decisions remained structural.

At a major point in the adventure, one choice can deeply reshape the rest of the story and lead the player toward different environments, characters and events.

Many games claim that choices matter.

Here, CD Projekt RED accepts a fairly expensive consequence of that philosophy:

creating content that some players will never see.

It may sound inefficient.

Narratively, that is exactly what gives the choice its weight.

2012: changing universes completely

While The Witcher continued to grow, CD Projekt RED announced a second major project in 2012.

Cyberpunk 2077.

This time, the swords disappeared.

In came guns.

Implants.

Corporations.

Networks.

Night City.

Like The Witcher, the project began with an existing universe: the Cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game created by Mike Pondsmith.

But the change in scale was considerable.

CD Projekt RED no longer wanted simply to tell an adventure across a handful of interconnected regions.

It was aiming for a dense, vertical and open metropolis.

The project would remain in development for a long time.

Meanwhile, another game was about to completely change the scale of the studio.

The Witcher 3: the moment everything changes

In 2015, CD Projekt RED released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The studio opened up its world.

But as much as possible, it avoided turning that openness into a simple collection of icons.

One of the game’s great strengths comes from a simple idea:

a side quest deserves a story too.

A monster contract can become a family tragedy.

A disappearance can reveal a local war.

A small decision made several hours earlier can return when the player has almost forgotten about it.

Secondary content therefore stops being necessarily secondary in the way it is treated.

The main adventure tells Geralt’s journey.

But the villages, roads, ruins and characters encountered along the way create the impression that the world has a life beyond that central story.

With Hearts of Stone and then Blood and Wine, the studio pushed the approach even further and turned its expansions into substantial adventures in their own right.

The success permanently changed CD Projekt RED.

The former Polish studio that had only recently been trying to complete its first RPG became one of the most closely watched names in the international industry.

And that success created something wonderful.

Resources.

Confidence.

A gigantic community.

But also expectations that were almost impossible to satisfy.

Cyberpunk 2077: when ambition meets its limits

Cyberpunk 2077 was released on December 10, 2020.

Few CD Projekt RED games had ever been anticipated on this scale.

And rarely had the gap between the different launch experiences been so problematic.

On the most powerful machines, many players discovered Night City, its characters and its technical ambitions.

On previous-generation consoles in particular, performance and technical issues were severe enough to trigger a major crisis around the release.

CD Projekt quickly acknowledged that the quality of those versions was far below its expectations.

For the studio, the problem went far beyond a few bugs.

The launch exposed the limits of an organization that had grown extremely quickly while attempting to build a game far more complex than its previous productions.

The story could have ended there.

But what followed became almost as important as the launch itself.

Repairing Night City

Over the following years, CD Projekt RED released numerous patches and updates.

The studio improved stability.

Reworked certain systems.

Released a dedicated current-generation console version.

Then came update 2.0, which transformed several major parts of the game: progression, skills, cyberware, policing and vehicle combat among them.

In 2023, the Phantom Liberty expansion accompanied this reconstruction.

Night City was no longer quite the same game it had been in December 2020.

And the perception surrounding Cyberpunk changed with it.

That transformation does not erase the launch.

Nor should it.

But it adds a second chapter to the story:

that of a studio forced to deal for several years with the consequences of its own production decisions.

Cyberpunk 2077 became both one of CD Projekt RED’s greatest successes and one of its most expensive warnings.

Cyberpunk becomes bigger than the game

During that reconstruction, something else happened.

The world of Night City began expanding beyond Cyberpunk 2077.

In 2022, Netflix released Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, an animated series produced by Studio Trigger in collaboration with CD Projekt RED.

The series did not simply retell the game in another format.

It told another story inside the same world.

That distinction is essential.

Cyberpunk began becoming a franchise capable of hosting multiple characters, stories and media.

CD Projekt RED was no longer simply developing games.

It was beginning to think in terms of universes.

A second series, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, continues that logic.

Leaving REDengine behind

The next transformation is less visible to players, but fundamental for the studio.

In 2022, CD Projekt RED announced a technological partnership with Epic Games and confirmed that its future major projects would use Unreal Engine 5.

For a company that had developed and evolved REDengine across several generations, the change was significant.

The studio gradually abandoned the idea that it needed to build a large part of its technological infrastructure entirely on its own.

The decision also responded to a new reality.

CD Projekt RED no longer wanted to produce one enormous game and then concentrate almost the entire company on the next.

It wanted to be able to develop several projects in parallel.

That requires a different organization.

More shared technology.

More predictable pipelines.

And above all, fewer situations where building the game and building the tool required to make the game become practically the same problem.

The Witcher 4: passing on the sword

The next major chapter is called The Witcher 4.

This time, Geralt is no longer the main character.

The role goes to Ciri.

That represents more than a change of face.

After three games built around Geralt, CD Projekt RED has to continue an enormously recognized franchise without simply reproducing its original trilogy.

The project is being developed with Unreal Engine 5 and marks the beginning of a new saga.

In 2025, CD Projekt RED and Epic Games presented a technology demonstration showing several systems intended to support its open world.

The message is interesting.

CD Projekt RED is not simply trying to build its next RPG with Unreal Engine.

The studio is working with Epic to adapt parts of the engine’s technology to the needs of large open worlds.

Changing engines therefore does not necessarily mean abandoning technological ambition.

It means relocating it.

Cyberpunk 2 and North America

At the same time, the future of Cyberpunk is being built primarily in North America.

The project previously known as Project Orion is now called Cyberpunk 2.

After its conceptual phase, it entered pre-production in 2025.

Development notably involves CD Projekt RED’s teams in Boston and Vancouver.

That is a major transformation for a company historically built around Warsaw.

The studio is now spread across several cities:

Warsaw.

Kraków.

Wrocław.

Vancouver.

Boston.

One team on paper.

But several time zones, several working cultures and multiple productions running simultaneously.

The ambition is no longer simply to create large worlds.

The studio now has to build the organization capable of making them.

And for the first time, an entirely original world

The Witcher comes from Sapkowski.

Cyberpunk comes from Mike Pondsmith.

But CD Projekt RED is also working on Hadar, the codename of a new intellectual property.

This time, the universe is being created entirely in-house.

It is an important symbolic step.

For twenty years, the studio has demonstrated that it knows how to adapt existing worlds, transform them and gradually build its own continuity around them.

With Hadar, it faces another question:

what does a CD Projekt RED universe become when absolutely nothing exists before it?

The answer will take time.

But for a studio whose identity was built around creatively appropriating worlds created elsewhere, the change is considerable.

What sets it apart

Choice as narrative material

CD Projekt RED games often give players important decisions.

But their particularity does not simply come from offering several dialogue buttons.

It comes from the way consequences are sometimes delayed.

The game does not always say:

“Here is the correct choice.”

It does not even necessarily say:

“Warning, this is an important decision.”

A choice may seem reasonable in the moment.

Then produce a far more ambiguous result several hours later.

That is where the system becomes interesting.

The player is no longer simply looking for the optimal reward.

They have to act with incomplete information.

Just like the characters.

At CD Projekt RED, choosing often means less about finding the right answer than accepting that you will have to live with the one you gave.

Side quests that refuse to remain secondary

Another studio signature became particularly visible with The Witcher 3.

Smaller stories are often given far more attention than their mechanical function would require.

A character encountered for only a few minutes may have:

a motivation;

a conflict;

a past;

a consequence.

The open world therefore gains credibility not necessarily because it contains more things.

But because some of those things seem to have a reason to exist.

That philosophy directly influences the way CD Projekt RED builds its environments.

A city or village is not simply an area to fill.

It is a concentration of potential stories.

Adapting without simply illustrating

CD Projekt RED mainly works with worlds that existed before its games.

That is true of The Witcher.

It is true of Cyberpunk.

But the studio does not simply try to reproduce those sources.

The Witcher games extend Sapkowski’s universe through their own continuity.

Cyberpunk 2077 moves Mike Pondsmith’s universe into another era while working directly with its creator.

That approach requires a delicate balance.

Respect the original material enough for it to remain recognizable.

Then take enough freedom for the game to have an existence of its own.

An adaptation that is too faithful can become an illustration.

An adaptation that is too loose can lose what it was meant to adapt.

CD Projekt RED often works precisely inside that space.

Technology in service of immersion

For years, the studio built that ambition with its own REDengine.

Then it decided to move to Unreal Engine 5.

That change may seem contradictory.

In reality, the objective remains fairly similar.

Technology matters only if it makes the world more believable.

Crowds.

Streaming.

Animation.

Lighting.

Density.

Transitions.

Performance.

The The Witcher 4 technology demonstration presented with Epic Games in 2025 illustrates that logic: several improvements directly concern the ability to build large open spaces rich in characters, vegetation and detail while maintaining performance.

CD Projekt RED no longer necessarily wants to own all of its technology.

It wants to own the way that technology serves its worlds.

Ambition can become a danger

One of CD Projekt RED’s most interesting traits is also one of its riskiest.

The studio likes to grow.

Every major project seems designed to solve a problem the previous one did not yet know how to solve.

The Witcher learns how to make an RPG.

The Witcher 2 builds technology and more heavily branching storytelling.

The Witcher 3 opens up the world.

Cyberpunk 2077 adds a dense metropolis, first-person perspective, vehicles, firearms and an entirely different technical scale.

That progression creates a constant feeling of ambition.

But Cyberpunk also reveals its darker side.

Trying to do more faster than the organization learns to do better eventually sends the bill.

CD Projekt RED’s current transformation — new processes, parallel development, international teams, its partnership with Epic and a change of engine — can be understood as an attempt to resolve precisely that contradiction.

Keep being ambitious.

Without depending on chaos to make it happen.

Good to know

• CD Projekt RED was founded in 2002, eight years after CD Projekt itself was created in 1994. The founding date of the group should therefore not be confused with that of the development studio.
• Development of the first The Witcher began in 2003. The game was eventually released on PC in October 2007 after around four years of production.
• The Witcher is based on the literary universe created by Andrzej Sapkowski. The games later developed their own continuity from that world.
• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was released in 2011 and used REDengine, the proprietary technology developed by CD Projekt RED.
• Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012 and is based on the tabletop role-playing universe created by Mike Pondsmith.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released on May 19, 2015. In May 2026, CD PROJEKT announced that the game had surpassed 65 million copies sold.
• Cyberpunk 2077 was released on December 10, 2020. CD PROJEKT acknowledged immediately after launch that performance on previous-generation consoles was far below its expectations.
• The studio then spent several years improving Cyberpunk 2077, culminating in the major changes introduced with update 2.0 and the release of the Phantom Liberty expansion in 2023.
• Cyberpunk 2077 had surpassed 35 million copies sold by the end of 2025, while Phantom Liberty had passed 10 million sales.
• CD Projekt RED is gradually leaving REDengine behind in favor of Unreal Engine 5, as part of a long-term technological partnership with Epic Games announced in 2022.
• The Witcher 4 is currently in production and begins a new saga with Ciri as its protagonist.
• Cyberpunk 2 entered pre-production in 2025 and notably involves the studio’s North American teams.
• CD Projekt RED is also working on Hadar, a new intellectual property created entirely in-house, unlike The Witcher and Cyberpunk universes.
• The studio currently employs more than 1,200 professionals across teams in Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, Boston and Vancouver.
• A third expansion for The Witcher 3, Songs of the Past, is also planned for 2027. It is being developed in collaboration with Fool’s Theory, with CD PROJEKT involved in the project.