It's now been over a year since CD Projekt Red, the game studio behind the Witcher franchise, revealed that The Witcher 4 would likely launch "after 2026." Now, in a recent announcement, CD Projekt Red revealed that it would be showing off The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt—Songs of the Past at Gamescom opening night, but that The Witcher 4 would not be making an appearance.

As Michał Nowakowski, joint-CEO of CDPR, explains in an X post and a YouTube video embedded below, The Witcher 4 is the studio's "biggest, boldest, and most ambitious game to date," and it has over 500 developers and artists working on the game. He adds that an exact launch date for The Witcher 4 has not been decided just yet, but the studio can confirm that the game will launch at some point in 2028.

CD Projekt RED unveiled its primary development project late last year: The Witcher IV. A pre-rendered cinematic trailer—utilizing a highly-customized Unreal Engine 5 build running on mystery NVIDIA GPU—showcased next-generation visuals. As revealed by NVIDIA in the new year, a GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card acted as the processing conduit for CD Projekt Red's fantasy featurette. Months later, company leadership has divulged a very loose timeframe for the highly-anticipated sequel's eventual launch. During a recent call with investors—exploring financial results from 2024, and future forecasts—the company expects profits to climb consistently over the next three years. As highlighted by many news reports, long-term franchise fans will need to remain patient—CD Projekt's calendar for next year seems to be free of forthcoming AAA content: "even though we do not plan to release The Witcher 4 by the end of 2026, we are still driven by this financial goal."

Given the Polish company's flagship branch kicking into a "full production" high gear phase around late 2024, a project on the (triple-A+) scale of The Witcher IV would require a long gestation period. Renewed online theories have placed a potential release window somewhere in 2027, possibly coinciding with the rollout of next-gen consoles. A noted industry soothsayer and veteran games journalist—Jason Schreier (resident at Bloomberg)—weighed in on the matter. He has dismissed many predictive reports about The Witcher IV arriving in 2026, as well as Naughty Dog's "The Heretic Prophet"—commenting on this topic, he stated: "I'm pretty sure I said they were both going to be very early teases. Neither of those games will be out next year." Piotr Nielubowicz—CD Projekt's chief financial officer—did not go into specifics during his firm's recently concluded earnings call: "we are not going to announce the precise launch date for the game yet. All we could share now to give more visibility to investors is that the game will not be launched within the time frame of the first target for the incentive program, which ends December 31, 2026."

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.