This article was originally published on June 19, 2025 - read the full issue

By Marie Dealessandri

The second instalment of our Edge In Person series took place yesterday, with Jörg Tittel interviewing CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michał Nowakowski on stage at DevGAMM Gdańsk. 

The fireside chat touched upon CDPR's "redemption arc" post-Cyberpunk 2077's release and its switch to Unreal Engine, among many other topics. Here are highlights of the discussion. 

 CD Projekt Red is spinning many plates at the moment, working on The Witcher 4, a remake of the original Witcher game, Project Hadar (its first original IP), Project Sirius (a new title set in the Witcher universe), and Cyberpunk 2. 

Nowakowski reminisced about Cyberpunk 2077's troubled launch, acknowledging how "heartbreaking" the period was for the studio. At the time, he saw the company's reputation as its "biggest asset," so fixing the title's trajectory was of utmost importance. The studio did so successfully, with Cyberpunk 2077 ultimately selling 35 million copies.

But some apologies, Nowakowski conceded, are never enough. 

"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," he said. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back – if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next." 

The aftermath of Cyberpunk had one silver lining, he revealed: "We were left with seasoned, battle-hardened veterans; leaders who were able to carry a different kind of challenge on their shoulders." It's that seniority, plus a positive financial situation, that now facilitates the studio's ability to juggle so many projects. 

"Our dream is to be making more games, although we never want to turn into the studio that's going to be launching a big game every year. It may happen, but this is not the goal. We have a rough ten-year rolling plan, but the goal is not to flood the games market with CDPR games. We just want to make really cool games, and we don't want to have a ton of IPs either. We're not planning to grow in that way." 

Whatever comes next will come with the support of Epic Games, with CDPR making the switch from its proprietary tech to Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4. The original Witcher ran on a modified version of BioWare's Aurora Engine, which Nowakowski says "was not a great fit to make the kind of RPGs we wanted to make." That led CDPR to create Red Engine, which it used up to Cyberpunk 2077. 

"A lot of people don't realise that, even though the Red Engines had numbers, they were not exactly built on the shoulders of the previous one. Realistically, because all of those games were pretty different, we were building a new engine almost from scratch for every single game, which was very time consuming." 

This mammoth task cut into the team's output. "Hiring was difficult. Onboarding for Red Engine was six to nine months, which is crazy," Nowakowski continued. "And there were no Red Engine experts out there. It just didn't exist, because it was a proprietary engine." 

The decision to switch to Unreal came after Epic showed CDPR its Matrix demo before it was made public. CDPR ultimately bagged a strong collaboration with Epic, and the privileged position to be able to add proprietary tech on top of Unreal. 

"Epic [allowed] us to go into the black box of Unreal Engine – I think we're the only company right now that actually does that outside of Epic themselves – and fiddle with [it], so [we] would actually be co-building one of the biggest techs out there. The rationale was we wanted to be able to tell more stories without worrying about the foundation of the engine itself. Epic [gave] us that backbone, and we can still build around that and differentiate ourselves."

There is no ignoring the current challenges facing the industry, and Nowakowski touched upon its fragmentation across triple-A, indies, double-A, mobile, and a "whole Roblox industry." To keep above water, he extolled the virtues of being "lean and cheap." 

"There's an unprecedented number of games being launched every year, and the fight for attention is tougher than it ever was. In the end, whether you can continue making games largely depends on whether you were successful enough to fund another project of your own. If you're lean and cheap, and are able to really target the group you want and live off that, then you're in a good spot. 

"I think the toughest spot is somewhere in the middle, where your costs are not insignificant any more, you may not necessarily have a brand or [a] target group [that] is very faithful, and actually getting back the money to fund your next project may not be easy." 

He noted that audiences largely underestimate how difficult it is to make games, especially in the AI era. He mentioned the increasing number of companies relying on generative AI and said he "knows for a fact" that a wave of games made purely with AI are incoming. 

"I was in a conversation with a person who started a studio and was telling me: 'I'm running a primarily AI-based studio. I can have 40 prototypes within a week, two weeks from now I can have five games that I chose are going to be the best and, three weeks from now, I'm actually launching a game'." 

Nowakowski sighed. "Maybe that's going to be successful, but I have some doubts whether this is really the path to follow." 

Concluding the hour-long discussion, Tittel asked Nowakowski how he sees the future of interactive entertainment, and the role CDPR is going to play within it. On the business front, he believes in the longevity of consoles, though he's unsure he'll still be able to say the same in ten years.  

"But they're not going anywhere anytime super soon. The method of delivery is going to be secondary to how you're [putting] together the stuff you're making. The big, tricky point is going to be how to put it in front of [people]. I don't think it's going to be getting any easier in terms of the number of games being produced. This is going to continue to be the trickiest point, but as long as you have a fresh idea, with a soul, with legs, you should have a genuine shot at being successful.  

"And you should be trying your own stuff, because I think success doesn't have to mean the same thing [to everyone]. There's room for a lot of game industries and genres to coexist. I don't think anybody should feel pressed to be the next… Bethesda, Techland, CD Projekt. You can be yourself, and as long as you feel you have achieved success, you can live another day to do something else. Be happy with your scale. Somebody else's dream doesn't have to be your dream."

This article was originally published on June 19, 2026 - read the full issue