CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michal Nowakowski has publicly admitted the studio has not completed its redemption arc after Cyberpunk 2077, and he is openly betting that The Witcher 4 is the game that wins back the players it lost. Speaking to Edge magazine, he said he is not convinced everyone has forgiven the studio for the 2020 launch, and that some of that trust is gone for good. That is a rare piece of corporate honesty, and it frames everything about how the next Witcher game gets built and judged.
What did CD Projekt Red actually say about Cyberpunk 2077?
Nowakowski described the Cyberpunk 2077 launch as heartbreaking for both the team and the players, and he refused to pretend the wound has fully closed. He acknowledged the studio lost the faith of a portion of its audience indefinitely, and he called that a fair price for what happened. The remarkable part is that he said this while sitting on a genuine commercial comeback. Cyberpunk 2077 has sold more than 35 million copies, the Phantom Liberty expansion was widely praised, and the game now carries strong reviews on Steam. By almost any sales metric the title recovered. Reputation, as Nowakowski admits, is a separate ledger entirely.
Why does The Witcher 4 carry so much pressure?
The Witcher 4 is the studio's primary vehicle for proving Cyberpunk 2077 was a single failure rather than a pattern. The game puts players in control of Ciri rather than Geralt, runs on Unreal Engine 5 instead of the older REDengine, and has more than 513 developers attached, which is over double the team that built The Witcher 3.
If it ships clean, the broken launch narrative around the studio dies. If it ships rough, that narrative hardens into a systemic problem, and every future release inherits the doubt. CD Projekt Red has also committed to releasing three Witcher games inside a six year window, which means there is no room for a stumble. The stakes are not really about one game. They are about whether the studio can deliver quality on demand.
How is the studio trying to avoid another disaster?
CD Projekt Red has rebuilt its development pipeline and adopted a stricter internal definition of what counts as finished work, a standard it applies to both The Witcher 4 and the Cyberpunk sequel. The company has refused to commit to a release date, a deliberate move away from the premature promises that doomed the last launch. Before The Witcher 4 even arrives, the studio faces a smaller test with Songs of the Past, a third expansion for The Witcher 3 developed alongside Fool's Theory and slated for 2027. Fans will judge that release as a preview of whether the lessons actually stuck.
For players the practical takeaway is simple. Treat trailers as marketing and wait for post launch reviews before deciding. The studio earned the skepticism, and Nowakowski is one of the few executives willing to say so out loud. Whether honesty translates into a flawless launch is the only question that matters, and it gets settled in the first few weeks after the game finally ships.