By Game development is a business of much secrecy and not a lot of behind-the-scenes insights, where players shouldn’t expect to get updates frequently. CD Projekt RED’s next game in The Witcher franchise is no different, but now we do have one of those rare updates, thankfully.
Note: the game isn’t technically called The Witcher 4, but we temporarily adopt that title for convenience and clarity purposes.
Almost 260 developers working on The Witcher 4, with more to join
During a financial results meeting, CD Projekt RED revealed that the number of people working on The Witcher 4, codenamed Polaris is incleasing, while the number of people working on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is planned to decrease.
CD Projekt’s CEO Adam Kiciński stated: “At the end of July, the Phantom Liberty team working on the pre-release phase consisted of 300 people. That’s fewer than as the end of 2022, but it still remains our biggest team.”
He continued about The Witcher 4: “On the other hand, the Polaris team has grown to almost 260 developers at the end of July. After releasing Phantom Liberty, we will transfer a big part of the team to Polaris.“
Finally, he also spoke about other projects in the pipeline, such as the Cyberpunk sequel and a totally new IP that the company is developing: “Some members will be moved onto Cyberpunk Orion [Cyberpunk 2] or Hadar [New IP], but we will also be supporting Phantom Liberty after launch.”
How long until the next Witcher game?
Game development these days is very long and a lot of AAA take over 5 years or more to release. That said, we can put into perspective roughly where The Witcher 4 is regarding how much of the team is working on it.
Cyberpunk 2077 was announced back in 2013, when The Witcher 3 was in full development. At the time, The Witcher 3 was priority #1 and that remained the case until the release of Blood & Wine in 2016. Only after that CDPR could reassign many more developers to Cyberpunk 2077, now that The Witcher 3 was done.
We currently seem to be in a similar stage. The work cycle for Cyperpunk 2077 is near its end with the upcoming release of it’s Phantom Liberty DLC and after that a lot of developers will join working on The Witcher 4 with that game becoming CDPR’s priority #1 that has the largest team.
All in all, The Witcher 4, which was announced back in March 2022, is still years away, but starting from late 2023 as Phantom Liberty is finished as well, the development for it will go in full steam with a larger team.
READ MORE: Every Upcoming Witcher Game From CD Projekt RED Explained
The Witcher Season 3 is available on Netflix with The Rats prequel in post-production and The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep anime by Studio Mir is far in production. Stay tuned to Redanian Intelligence and do pop into our Discord server to join in on The Witcher conversation.
