CD Projekt plan to release The Witcher 4, 5, & 6 within six years of one another, and oh, are those pigs flying?

If a CEO says their company is going to do that something sounds ridiculously unrealistic, or borderline unachievable if you actually take a second to think about it, you can probably assume that this is for the ears of shareholders. With that said, CD Projekt Red recently held a financial call (thanks, IGN), where co-CEO Michał Nowakowski made some comments about The Witcher 4… and The Witcher 5 and 6, all of which are apparently planned to be released within a six-year period. Right!

To dig a touch more into that, Nowakowski specifically frame it this way: “[CD Projekt Red have] been using UE5 for The Witcher 4 for almost four years now, and we’re very happy with what we’ve achieved… and we’re happy with how the engine is evolving through the Epic team’s efforts, and how we are learning how to make it work within a huge open-world game, as TW4 is meant to be.”

He goes on to note that he believes further games should be released in quicker succession than in recent years (The Witcher 3 turned 10 this year after all, and even Cyberpunk 2077 is already five years old). And, as the developer has apparently claimed before, their “plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period, so yes, that would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between TW4 and TW5, between TW5 and TW6 and so on.”

I think it should be made quite clear that the intention to do something like this is very different from the practical reality of doing this. Insomniac Games admittedly achieved that with its Spider-Man games, but all three of them are set in the same map, and Miles Morales was much shorter than the other two, too. If The Witcher 5 and 6 were to do something similar, perhaps it’d be a different story, but with as big as CD Projekt games are, you should be taking this with several pinches of salt.

Both The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 seem to be chugging along well enough, but they’re both obviously still years out, so, we’ll see how CD Projekt’s plans develop.