Cyberpunk 2077‘s journey started out on a rocky note, but the game will now go down in history as a success story for the ages. Following a disastrous launch in December 2020, it bounced back with plenty of fixes, free content updates, the Edgerunners anime series, and most recently, its first and only expansion, Phantom Liberty.
After more than a decade of work, CD Projekt Red is going out with a bang. The company’s latest financial results revealed that it no longer has any developers working on the open-world RPG, down from the 17-person headcount shown during the a financial presentation held on 29 February this year.
As of last month, the majority of the studio seem to have directed their efforts into Project Polaris, a new entry in The Witcher series. Meanwhile, 56 individuals are working on Project Orion, the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. Other works in the pipeline include a live-action adaptation of Cyberpunk 2077 and the following myraid of The Witcher games:
- Canis Majoris – “A full-fledged Witcher game, separate to the new Witcher saga starting with Polaris. It will be developed by an external studio headed by experienced developers who have worked on past Witcher games.”
- Sirius – “A codename for the game developed by [The Molasses Flood], set in The Witcher universe and created with support from CDPR. It will differ from our past productions, offering multiplayer gameplay on top of a single-player experience including a campaign with quests and a story.”
- Hadar – “A codename for a third, entirely distinct IP, created from scratch within CD Projekt Red. The project is in the earliest stages of the creative process, which means we are not developing any game yet, but working exclusively on the foundation for this new setting.”
Of course, it’s possible that the CD Projekt Red will shift some of its staff back to Cyberpunk 2077 for another update in the near future. For now though, the title is taking a well-deserved rest — since it was first teased in 2013, development, including conceptualisation and planning, can be traced back to more than a decade ago.