Reuters has conducted an interview with Adam Badowski and Michał Nowakowski—Joint Chief Executive Officers at CD Projekt. The news agency wanted to find out more about the current roster of projects in development across the Polish gaming group's globally-scattered studios. The Boston branch of CD Projekt Red has started work on a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel—codenamed "Orion"—as revealed by Igor Sarzyńsk (Narrative Director) earlier this month. The sequel's scope could grow beyond a single-player campaign—Nowakowski mentioned in the Reuters interview that multiplayer elements are under consideration by "Orion's" design team, but he declined to elaborate any further. CD Projekt Red downed tools on Cyberpunk 2077's multiplayer aspect around launch time (December 2020), and instead focused on improving the game's core functionality. A "triple-A" multiplayer spin-off was teased a few years ago, but abandoned at some point in favor of a new "more systematic, agile approach."

Badowski stated that "Orion" is still in a conceptual phase of development, and its team is expected to grow over the course of 2024—he anticipates around eighty members of staff by the end of the year. The North American team appears to be on a recruitment drive, while the European "Orion" gang is not expected to expand as quickly. The priority for CD Projekt's Warsaw studio is "Polaris" AKA the next mainline Witcher title—Badowski elaborated on their hiring goals in Poland: "we'd like to have around 400 people working on the project by the middle of the year." The joint-CEOs want "Polaris" entering into a full production stage in 2024—industry analysts predict a 2026 or 2027 launch window. Reuters brought up the obligatory question about artificial intelligence's place in CDPR operations—Nowakowski responded with: "We think that AI is something that can help improve certain processes in game production, but not replace people." When grilled about lessons learned from launch day disasters, Badowski stated that his company's production pipelines have undergone a positive overhaul: "We believe that in the future we'll avoid a premiere like the one we faced with Cyberpunk 2077"

CD Projekt has admitted to writing off the development funds spent so far expended on Project Sirius - a codename for a satellite studio produced spin-off game in its best selling The Witcher series. The Polish development and publishing group is restarting Project Sirius from scratch, and it is not clear whether their East Coast USA-based outfit, Molasses Flood, will remain as part of the rebooted cycle. Within a recently released company financial report its reasoning was made clear: "The aforementioned decision is based on results of evaluation of the scope and commercial potential of the original concept of Project Sirius, and ongoing work on formulating a new framework for this project."

CD Projekt had spent over $7 million in 2022 on development costs for Project Sirius. More than $2.2 million has been spent in 2023, presumably right up until the decision to bin all currently completed work. Project Sirius was announced in the autumn of 2022, and at around that time Molasses Flood was undertaking a large scale recruitment drive. The game was in a pre-production phase by the end of the year, with over sixty members of staff confirmed to be working on it. Development was also being supported by members of CD Projekt RED's team at their Warsaw headquarters, and now it is very apparent that the overseers were not happy with what was going on in New England.

This here is a theme quite close to my heart, since I've spent more time on The Witcher 3 than on any other singular game. CD Projekt Red has announced that their prodigal child, The Witcher 3 series (based on Andrzej Sapkowski's novels which you should definitely read if you like either well-written stories or The Witcher's world) has soared past the 25 million copies sold.

This has translated into pretty considerable revenues for the Polish company - those generated by the sales of The Witcher 3 and its expansion packs have, since the base game's release in May 2015, topped 1 billion PLN (around $254 million dollars). The 2016 revenues and net profit of CD Projekt were still 75% of those obtained by the company in the year that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt shipped - which just goes to show how much the series achieved with its release.