The Witcher 4 is gradually approaching its release — CD Projekt yesterday reported for 2023, which was the second best year in the history of the famous Polish video game developer.
The new «Witcher» has entered the pre-production stage — as of February 29, 2024, more than 60% (400 employees) of the CD Projekt team have already worked on the game. According to the plan, the project will enter the full (active) development phase in the second half of 2024.
Let us remind you that the next part of the famous witch series will be released for the first time was announced back in March 2022under the code name Polaris. It is being developed on the Unreal Engine 5 engine by the internal team of CD Projekt and is supposed to start a new trilogy.
The studio’s other announced games are being developed by much fewer employees A remake of the first «Witcher» (Canis Majoris) on Unreal Engine 5 by Fool’s Theory, the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 codenamed Orion, and CD Projekt RED’s first game in its own franchise (Hadar) — all of which are currently at the «conceptual design» stage.
Another interesting news from the report — CD Projekt is considering the possibility of licensing Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher IP to third-party studios to create mobile games. So far, no specifics.
In 2023, CD Pojekt Red earned PLN 1.23 billion ($307.65 million), up 29% from 2022. Net profit reached PLN 481 million ($120.3 million), which is 39% higher than in 2022. As mentioned at the beginning, 2023 was the second best year in the history of CDPR — net profitability reached 39%.
The lion’s share of the money in 2023 came from sales of Cyberpunk 2077 — 826 million PLN ($206.6 million) to the general treasury. The total sales of Cyberpunk 2077 together with the «Illusion of Freedom» / Phantom Liberty expansion exceeded $750 million. Financial reserves increased to PLN 1.3 billion, enabling CD Pojekt Red to reach the «safe state».
The total sales of CD Pojekt Red games exceeded 100 million copies, including more than 75 million for The Witcher trilogy and another 25 million for Cyberpunk 2077. The company is confident that the action RPG will sell well for a very long time, just like the third «Witcher», that made its way into the top 10 best-selling games in history.