CD Projekt RED famously suffered a major hit to its sterling reputation with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, mainly because of the major bugs and terribly underwhelming console performance on previous-generation hardware, which forced Sony to remove the game from the PlayStation Store until it was fixed a few months later.
The Polish studio worked very hard to resolve all these technical issues and further improve the game's features and content, culminating in the release of Update 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty expansion, both of which were extremely well received and made the game very appealing to gamers once again (as of last November, Cyberpunk 2077 has sold 35 million units to date).
Now that CD Projekt RED is mainly focused on The Witcher 4, the question is whether the community has completely forgiven them. In an interview with EDGE's Knowledge weekly newsletter, joint CEO Michał Nowakowski admitted that some users may still be resentful of what happened with Cyberpunk 2077, but the executive is still hopeful to win back everyone eventually, maybe with The Witcher 4 or some other future title.
I'm not 100 percent convinced we went through the full redemption arc. I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back – if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next.
Nowakowski did note that something positive came from all that hardship: the developers are now "battle-hardened veterans".
We were left with seasoned, battle-hardened veterans; leaders who were able to carry a different kind of challenge on their shoulders.
Overall, CD Projekt RED has an ambitious 10-year-plus plan that includes the new The Witcher trilogy, the remake of The Witcher (in development at Fool's Theory), Project Sirius (a rebooted multiplayer The Witcher spin-off in development at Molasses Flood, now part of CDPR), Cyberpunk 2, and the mysterious new IP Project Hadar. That said, Nowakowski stressed that CDPR will never turn into a studio that releases games on an annual cadence:
Our dream is to be making more games, although we never want to turn into the studio that's going to be launching a big game every year. It may happen, but this is not the goal. We have a rough ten-year rolling plan, but the goal is not to flood the games market with CDPR games. We just want to make really cool games, and we don't want to have a ton of IPs either. We're not planning to grow in that way.
The studio's first test with its community will take place next year, with the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Songs of the Past, the third expansion for the award-winning open world action RPG. While the development is being co-developed with Fool's Theory, fans will primarily judge CDPR, especially given what happened with Cyberpunk 2077.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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