Highly anticipated: Despite The Witcher 4 still being several years away, CD Projekt Red will attend The Game Awards 2025 on December 11 in recognition of its nomination for Most Anticipated Game. If all goes to plan, fans may not have to wait as long for The Witcher 5 and 6, which are slated to launch within six years of the upcoming sequel.
CD Projekt Red used its latest earnings call to reaffirm one of its most ambitious goals: releasing an entire Witcher trilogy within six years. However, the studio also emphasized that the six-year countdown will not begin until The Witcher 4 launches, and executives confirmed that the next mainline entry will not arrive in 2026. So, optimistically, the earliest we could see all three sequels is 2033.
During the Q&A portion of the call, Michał Nowakowski, CDPR's vice president of business development, said The Witcher 4 is now in full-scale production and progressing according to plan. He couldn't go into detail about technical or design risks that could delay the project, but did say that so far, things look good.
"There's nothing out of the ordinary in that area [delay risks] happening with TW4 – it's just full-scale production proceeding at its pace, as per our internal plans," Nowakowski answered, while avoiding nailing down a launch window. "I think that's as much as we can say."
Nowakowski's comments also reinforced why the studio believes it can release three large-scale RPGs on a shorter cadence than ever before. CDPR has spent four years working with Epic on Unreal Engine 5, and he said the team is "very happy" with its accomplishments, pointing to the PS5 tech demo shown at Epic's State of Unreal event (above). Although the developers labeled that footage "not actual gameplay," it demonstrated how far CDPR has pushed UE5 for a massive open-world game.
The transition from REDEngine to Unreal 5 is crucial to CDPR's six-year Project Polaris (TW4-6) release schedule.
"Our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period," Nowakowski said. "That would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between TW4 and TW5, between TW5 and TW6 and so on."
The statement mirrors what the studio first outlined in its 2022 roadmap, but the earnings call clarified the part often glossed over: the six-year window starts at the end of The Witcher 4's production, not from today.
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The presentation also touched on the broader slate. Chief Financial Officer Piotr Nielubowicz stressed that the newly announced collectible card game is a physical product rather than a video game and is not one of the company's capitalized, unannounced projects. He also mentioned that company representatives would attend The Game Awards 2025 in recognition of The Witcher 4's nomination for the most anticipated game of the year. However, Nielubowicz stressed that they would not have any announcements or trailers to present during the show.
Meanwhile, development continues on several other projects: Project Sirius, a third-party multiplayer Witcher game headed up by The Molasses Flood; Project Hadar, a new, unannounced in-house IP; and Cyberpunk 2, the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, previously known as Project Orion. Fool's Theory continues work on the Witcher 1 remake, though most of that studio is assisting with The Witcher 4 at the moment.
CD Projekt Red's internal staffing reflects how heavily it is leaning into Polaris. The Witcher team has grown from 160 developers in 2022 to 447 active developers today. The final employee count could grow to 510 before completion. Last year, the studio said The Witcher 4 was further along than any other CDPR game and expected it to launch before the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel headed into full production.
Whether that momentum carries through two rapid-fire sequels remains an open question. Even if UE5 accelerates development, The Witcher 6 will arrive in a very different hardware landscape. New consoles and Unreal Engine 6 may already be standard by then, raising the pressure on CDPR to future-proof the technology underpinning an entire trilogy before the first entry even ships.
CD Projekt Red still plans three Witcher games in six years, but the clock hasn't started yet
