Not only does the next Witcher game have a sizable development team, but it’ll get even bigger once the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC is out.
CD Projekt has been very coy about what to expect from its next The Witcher game, which isn’t that surprising. It was only announced via a logo last year and the company is obviously prioritising the launch of Cyberpunk 2077’s DLC expansion, Phantom Liberty.
The Polish studio has since provided an update on the new Witcher’s development, revealing that as of the end of July, its team consists of roughly 250 people.
What’s more, that number will only go up, as the plan is to move a large chunk of Phantom Liberty’s staff onto The Witcher once development on the DLC wraps up.
CEO Adam Kiciński explained in an earnings call with investors that the Phantom Liberty team, at the end of July, consisted of 300 people.
‘That’s fewer than at the end of 2022, but it still it remains our biggest team,’ says Kiciński. ‘After releasing Phantom Liberty, we will transfer a big part of the team to Polaris.’
As a reminder, Polaris is the codename given to the new Witcher game, which still lacks an actual title. So, there’s no guarantee it’ll be called The Witcher 4, especially since it’s meant to be starting a new saga.
The only other thing CD Projekt has confirmed is that it will not be using its own REDengine and the game will instead be made with Unreal Engine 5.
The rest of Phantom Liberty’s team will either move onto other projects such as Orion (the codename for the Cyberpunk sequel) or continue to support Phantom Liberty with post-launch updates.
All of these staff levels are at the high end of the scale for a AAA game. 300 is an enormous amount for DLC, as The Witcher 3 only had 250 in-house staff working on it – although including external studios around 1,500 people were involved in its production overall.
However, it’s a useful illustration of how current gen games require more time, money, and personnel to create. CD Projekt has over 1,200 employees overall and while not all are developers the number working on The Witcher 4 could easily reach 500 or more in-house staff by its peak.
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