CD Projekt 最好时光或在前方（基于财报与并行开发分析）

CD Projekt develops and publishes premium role-playing games (RPGs) as well as licenses its franchises to commercial partners like Netflix. For most of its history, it has moved from one enormous production to the next. The Witcher 3 arrived in 2015, Cyberpunk 2077 followed in 2020, and its Phantom Liberty expansion came three years later. The next announced standalone flagship, The Witcher 4, is targeted for 2028. That leaves the company with a familiar question: what supports the business while one flagship absorbs years of work? Or as joint CEO Michał Nowakowski framed the goal in a recent interview: “how can we do more, but not compromise on quality?”

Part of the answer is that CD Projekt now has more of its studio moving in parallel. The Witcher 4 is in full production, Cyberpunk 2 is in pre-production within a growing North American organization, and several smaller or partner-led projects sit around them. CD Projekt still heavily depends on blockbusters, but it is trying harder to make each one a foundation for later releases while another franchise advances alongside it.

So far the transition has been well managed, in part because its mature games still sell well. The company generated PLN 435M ($120M) in revenue and PLN 249M ($68M) in net profit in the first half of 2026, even without a major new release. CD Projekt’s first-half revenue has risen every year since 2023, while its net margin climbed from 37% to 57%, even though the company has not launched another standalone blockbuster during this period.

*Source: CD Projekt H1 2026 investor presentation*

Most recently, existing Cyberpunk and Witcher products have supplied most of the revenue, while licensing and partnerships have contributed nearly PLN 95M ($26M). That latter contribution includes undisclosed initiatives, but it reflects the broader effort to keep its franchises commercially active. For example, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is scheduled to return to Netflix later this month, and it’s important to remember that the first season led to a spike in players of Cyberpunk 2077 back in 2022. A new, live-action Cyberpunk movie with Paramount was also just announced.

At the same time, the company invested roughly PLN 385M ($106M) in new development work (through capitalized project expenditures) during the half and ended June with about PLN 1.29B ($341M) across cash, deposits, and bonds. That cash flow and cash hoard cushion give CD Projekt more flexibility to invest in overlapping projects.

Building Two Flagship Teams

The clearest evidence of organizational change is that Cyberpunk 2 is advancing before the next Witcher game is finished. Its allocation rose from 84 developers in February 2025 to 184 by July 2026, including 21 additions between April and July. Shared services added another 23 people over those three months, while The Witcher 4 remained near 500 developers.

Yes, these games are at different stages, but even so, Cyberpunk 2 having 35% of the staff size of The Witcher 4 as the latter nears peak production is a real change of pace from the past. It’s not an entirely new way of operating — CD Projekt developed Phantom Liberty while early work on The Witcher 4 was underway — but this represents a bigger jump since Phantom Liberty wasn’t a standalone production and was built with an established technical base.

Cyberpunk 2 is being developed across studios in Boston, Vancouver, and Poland, alongside remote staff. Consequently, CD Projekt’s North American presence is evolving far beyond a simple satellite branch (which contrasts with the broader move away from North American development elsewhere in the industry). According to a company interview with an engineering director, three directors divide core responsibilities and map cross-location interdisciplinary dependencies.

In tandem with these organizational shifts, CD Projekt is transitioning its upcoming portfolio from REDengine (its proprietary technology) to Unreal Engine 5. Previously, the company coupled game design with ongoing iteration of its REDengine, requiring significant additional manpower and time to get both ready for production. By adopting Unreal Engine as a unified foundation, the studio can more easily transfer tools, engineering expertise, and talent across teams, enabling faster speed of development. Of course, this migration does not instantly streamline production. CD Projekt must construct customized internal pipelines on top of the engine, and hundreds of staff members have had to adapt to a new technical environment. However, in the long run, betting on a best-in-class engine that enables superior technology reuse and greater focus on design should provide upside that’s worth the pain of transitioning.

Taken together, superior financial footing, an engine reset, and a growing team that’s split across parallel AAA projects have laid the groundwork for CD Projekt to expand and accelerate its release schedule without creating new development bottlenecks.

Expanding Into the Future

Source: CD Projekt H1 investor presentation

Although management does not appear to be rushing The Witcher 4, it has repeatedly said it aims to release all three games in the new Witcher trilogy within six years beginning with The Witcher 4. It has not published dates for the next two games, and according to joint CEO Nowakowski “it would be difficult for us to add an expansion to the upcoming trilogy.” This acceleration, despite low DLC hopes, is perhaps aggressive, but it is in part made more realistic by the shift to Unreal, enabling the future team to reuse The Witcher 4’s technology, assets, and pipelines.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, which was released last week to exceptional critical acclaim, helped lay the foundation for the new trilogy. Polish studio Fool’s Theory led the remaster — it is also co-developing the Songs of the Past expansion with CD Projekt for 2027 and The Witcher 1 Remake for 2029 (or later) — and used the toolset created for the new saga. These releases give CD Projekt something new to market during a long production cycle while helping lay the groundwork for The Witcher 4 (and all that comes after).

There are other new projects at different stages behind the scenes, too.

Project Sirius, initially announced as a Witcher-universe game with both single-player and multiplayer, is a reminder that adding a project does not automatically create another reliable production line or revenue catalyst. CD Projekt reformulated the game in 2023, later integrated developer The Molasses Flood into its North American organization, and still describes Sirius as being in pre-production. The reset may ultimately produce a better game, but it has already required more time and organizational involvement than the original roadmap suggested.

Project Hadar remains at an even earlier stage. It is a wholly original franchise, but the company has not yet disclosed its setting, genre, or core design. Hadar had 33 developers in July, with management planning to reach as many as 50 by year-end, and it remains in concept and prototyping. It’s best viewed as a potential seed for the next decade, alongside a couple of other unannounced projects whose scale and role remain undisclosed and that may or may not turn into anything substantial.

For now, the company’s upcoming success is all about making the most of The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2. CD Projekt has seemingly done a good job working with partners (Fool’s Theory in particular, which includes a bunch of ex-CD Projekt veterans), and Nowakowski’s description of the company’s intended structure as “three isolated teams with clear leadership, with clear vision” while acknowledging that CD Projekt cannot keep expanding beyond what it can supervise sounds like a reasonable setup.

The Best Days May Be Ahead

The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 continue to grow the business years after launch, and that catalog has funded a larger organization while maintaining profitability. Moving future games onto Unreal and building a shared Witcher foundation are sensible ways to reuse work, while separately led Witcher and Cyberpunk teams make parallel development possible for CD Projekt.

Results, of course, will remain lumpy. CD Projekt will remain driven by blockbuster releases that don’t happen on fixed schedules, and the studio has already delayed and reformulated various projects. But a larger catalog and two advancing flagship teams can make each upward step bigger and faster, while giving more of the organization useful work between launches.

CD Projekt therefore may be on the verge of entering its strongest period yet. It’s something that might’ve been hard to imagine after the botched Cyberpunk 2077 launch, but the team has done a great job stabilizing Cyberpunk, revitalizing interest in The Witcher, building a stable profit foundation, leveling up parallel development, and presenting fans with an exciting pipeline for the future. If these operating improvements continue into future launches, CD Projekt is on a path to record scale. It’s a turnaround that we will continue rooting for.

Sponsor: Integrate Safe UGC Into Your Game with CurseForge For Studios

Overwolf is an all-in-one platform that lets creators build, share, and monetize in-game apps, mods, and private servers. With over 178K creators and 113M monthly active users, Overwolf supports the world’s most popular AAA titles, including League of Legends, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and 1,500 other games.

For game developers, Overwolf offers CurseForge For Studios. CurseForge For Studios is a white-label solution that lets game makers and publishers safely and seamlessly integrate mods into existing and new games at zero cost. It’s battle-tested by AAA studios and games, including Krafton (inZOI), Studio Wildcard (ARK), Take-Two Interactive (KSP), and others.

CurseForge For Studios offers:

Cross-Platform Modding: Integrate Overwolf’s open-source SDK and plugins to let players discover and install mods in-game, across all platforms and storefronts.
Moderation to Ensure Safety: Studios define policies and guidelines on what is permitted, with Overwolf ensuring that only authorized and appropriate content is published.
Creator Relations and Payments: CurseForge supports creators with monthly payments, equity investments, developer contests, and hackathons to kickstart content creation for your game.
Harness Existing Creator Community: Tap into the creative expertise and knowledge of a passionate community of 178K creators.
Premium Mods Integration: Crafted by game studios and select community modders, Premium Mods offer players a next-level modding experience through guaranteed high-quality content, while offering creators a powerful new revenue stream.

Learn More

In Other News

Funding and M&A:

Business & Product:

Miscellaneous:

Content Worth Consuming

Nimrod Klinger, VP of Marketing at CrazyLabs: Hybrid Casual, AI-Native Teams, and the New Role of UA (Unpredictable Hits): “Amit sits down with Nimrod Klinger, VP of Marketing at CrazyLabs, who started as the company’s only UA manager, working alongside one video editor and one graphic designer, and grew with it through kids’ games, hyper-casual and hybrid casual. For Nimrod, changing how the team works starts with doing the work himself, making time to build with AI and expecting people to stretch beyond their specialties. He explains how adoption became mandatory, with all 35 marketers presenting their progress to him and the COO, and why human judgment remains essential as creative production gets faster.”

How Undead Labs Saved Itself and State of Decay From Oblivion (The Game Business): “In this edition, we welcome Philip Holt, the boss of State of Decay developer Undead Labs. The studio has just declared its independence from Xbox, but has had to lay off a ‘significant’ number of staff as it prepares to release State of Decay 3 next year. We discuss the studio’s new independence, why it didn’t find a buyer, whether it has enough to finish the upcoming horror game, the business realities facing smaller teams and his “irresponsible” approach to transparency.”

How to Create an Immersive Climbing Game with Cairn (The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook): “Chris Charla chats with The Game Bakers’ Audrey Leprince and Emeric Thoa about their latest release, the climbing adventure Cairn. Together they discuss the history of their studio with titles like Furi and Haven; how they approach narrative by making players make big choices with no clear right or wrong answers; how Cairn recreates real world climbing; balancing difficulty and expanding player freedom; and the noticeable surge of great games originating from France.”

The Wizard of Wizardry Brenda Romero (The Fourth Curtain): “The great Brenda Romero is our guest. CEO and co-founder Romero Games, she’s made both commercial hits like Jagged Alliance, and true art games like Train. BAFTA winner and author of Sex in Video Games, she still has time to 100% Balatro. We talk monster spreadsheets and free play.”

You Hit $1,000/Day in Ad Revenue. Now Here Are the 5 Tricks Ad Networks Hope You NEVER Learn (two & a half gamers): “Felix, solo from Istanbul, with the advanced ad monetization episode nobody makes: what to do once your game is earning $1,000 a day in ads. The core idea is that ad revenue stacks on top of itself, so tactics that were a waste of time at $100 a day are suddenly worth real money, and the networks know it better than you do.”

“It’s Less Risky to Be the Masters of Our Own Fate” – The AAA Developers Going Indie (gamesindustry.biz): “Justin Fischer and Brock Feldman suddenly found themselves out of a job in 2025, when Warner Bros decided to shutter their studio, Player First Games, the developer of Multiversus. The free-to-play fighting game, which featured various Warner Bros characters, had launched in beta in 2022 before going offline around a year later, in preparation for the full launch in May 2024. Warner acquired Player First just after that 1.0 launch – then announced the studio’s closure seven months later, after pulling the plug on Multiversus.”

The post CD Projekt’s Best Days May Be Ahead appeared first on Naavik.