Last updated: 5 September 2026

The Witcher 4 Dev Approach — Lessons From Cyberpunk 2077's Rocky Launch

Cyberpunk 2077's 2020 launch — pulled from PlayStation's store entirely after its PS4 version proved close to unplayable — is still the reference point CD Projekt Red measures itself against. Here's what co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has said, on the record, about what's concretely different this time.

01The Core Claim: "It's Going to Run"

Speaking to Game Developer in an interview published August 27, 2026, Nowakowski described the current state of The Witcher 4's build in blunt terms: "You come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now. You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it's going to run."

That's not a claim that the game is finished, feature-complete, or free of bugs — it's a claim that a working, launchable build already exists on every target platform, roughly two years ahead of the 2028 release window CD Projekt Red announced at Gamescom 2026.

02Why This Matters: Cyberpunk 2077's PC-First Problem

Nowakowski was explicit that this approach exists because of what went wrong with Cyberpunk 2077. In his words, the studio's old philosophy was that "we are reaching for the best possible visuals... PC was just the best suited rig," with console versions treated as a downscaling exercise to tackle later. That assumption turned out to be badly wrong for last-gen consoles — Cyberpunk 2077's PS4 and Xbox One versions launched in a state bad enough that Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store for months.

The Witcher 4's stated fix is platform parity from day one: the game is built and tested on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X simultaneously throughout development, rather than console versions being adapted from a PC-first build near the end.

03Stricter Milestones: No More "We'll Fix It Later"

Nowakowski also described a change to how the studio handles development checkpoints. Previously, he said, a milestone might have "10 checkmarks," and the team would sometimes accept shipping a phase with one or two unmet, planning to circle back later — an approach he said "sometimes failed, creating cascading problems."

• Under the new process, when a problem shows up on any single platform, work reportedly pauses across the project until the root cause is found and fixed, rather than being logged for a later pass.
• Nowakowski summarized the philosophy as: "we don't take chances... we want to be sure that it actually works."

04Radical Transparency About Headcount

The other visible change is how openly CD Projekt Red now talks about staffing. At Gamescom 2026, the studio disclosed that The Witcher 4's team had grown to roughly 519 developers (up from 513 at the end of April 2026), while Cyberpunk 2's team had grown to roughly 184 (up from 163 in April) — part of a combined 975 active developers across the studio's projects, including 70 recent new hires.

CD Projekt Red has framed these periodic resourcing updates as part of rebuilding trust with players after Cyberpunk 2077's launch, on the reasoning that being transparent about where the studio actually stands is better than letting expectations run ahead of reality.

05What This Doesn't Tell Us

It's worth being precise about what "it runs" does and doesn't prove. A functional, launchable build isn't the same as a finished, polished, or bug-free game — Cyberpunk 2077 itself ran on last-gen consoles during development too, and still had serious problems at launch. Nowakowski's comments describe a process change intended to catch platform-specific issues earlier, not a guarantee that The Witcher 4 will avoid every launch problem. The game is still roughly two years from its targeted 2028 window, and CD Projekt Red has not detailed frame rate, resolution, or performance targets for any platform.