CD Projekt Red: If you want a cost-driven development, you cannot make

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Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTubeIn This Edition,CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michał Nowakowski on…Making multiple projectsReturning to The Witcher 3State of consolesPlus, discs, Unreal Engine, Switch 2, TV shows, and moreDeath is the great motivator. And it’s certainly motivating CD Projekt Red.For 20 years, The Witcher developer has worked on one major project at a time. But today, it’s making three. There’s The Witcher 4, due in 2028, a sequel to Cyberpunk and a new IP called Project Hadar.“Everybody has a biology built into them. We were like, ‘if we keep doing things the way we do, and we have a lot of ideas, we’re only going to make X, Y, Z before we retire, or naturally retire from this place’,” says CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michał Nowakowski on today’s The Game Business Show.“So how can we do more, but not compromise on quality?

This was the predominant thought behind that. And then we started thinking, ‘Okay, what’s the business around that?’ This is my biggest wish. I’d like us to look back and say, ‘Okay, we did it, we told two, three stories instead of just one within that moment, and all of them were top-notch’.”The cynic might suggest that there’s another, more commercial reason why CD Projekt Red would want to develop multiple major games at once. But Nowakowski believes financial growth isn’t entirely down to making more games. The Witcher 3 may now be on 65 million sales, with Cyberpunk 2077 on 40 million, but there’s room to sell more, he says.“If you look at what GTA V sold, these are very different numbers to what we have achieved.

There is still room for growth.”There is another option to getting more games out, and that’s to simply make them faster. Not only would that allow CD Projekt Red to release more, it’d also help bring down costs. But it’s not how the studio thinks.“We are cost-conscious,” Nowakowski explains. “It’s not unimportant. We’re a business in the end. But the first thing is whether the qualityis there, period. This is the dominant thing we look at.“I definitely wouldn’t put cost in the number one position, as weird as that may sound. We try to make sure we’re within the boundaries, or if it’s exceeding, then we sit down and think what it means for everything.

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But I definitely wouldn’t say this is a cost-driven development. If you want to have a cost-driven development, and that’s a proper business thinking for a lot of games, you cannot make a game like The Witcher 4. I doubt if the development of GTA VI was a cost-driven development. In fact, I’m 100% sure it wasn’t.”Nevertheless, to achieve the goal of multiple projects does require a technical rethink. The developer has walked away from its REDengine, which powered The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, in favour of Unreal Engine. Nowakowski tells us that REDengine needed starting from scratch with each new release.

By moving to Unreal, it should make switching between projects simpler.Initially, there will be some pain. Pipelines and tools will need reworking and changing. But the bigger threat from this technical pivot is whether using an off-the-shelf engine might negatively impact the uniqueness of the games.“That was a big question we were asking ourselves, because pushing the envelope with how the games look, the cinematic feel of it all, is very, very important,” Nowakowski answers. “And that was a big question mark when we were in the R&D phase over whether Unreal Engine 5 is going to be a good fit or not.

We really asked ourselves all of these questions, and in some cases the answer was, ‘not yet.’“But together with Epic, we can bring it to that point. I know when we made that switch, people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to be another Unreal-looking game.’ But we’re not going to be. We really are going to be able to differentiate ourselves. People are going to feel this is a CDPR game still, and the technology under the hood is actually going to be irrelevant from a pure fan perspective.”In today’s edition of The Game Business Show, Nowakowski expands on CD Projekt’s multi-game vision, discusses the state of consoles, Cyberpunk 2077’s Switch 2 launch, TV and movie adaptations, The Witcher 3 Remastered, and more.

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