From announcement to release, CD Projekt Red typically takes 4-5 years to release a game. And yet, this number is not stopping them from making a bold claim: they want to release The Witcher 4 and it’s two sequels within a 6 year span.

But first, some bad news. Speaking in an investor call, joint studio CEO Michał Nowakowski confirmed: “We’re not disclosing any details regarding the target release date, so there’s not a point in time I could refer to when answering such a question. The only thing we’re commenting is that we’re not launching in 2026“.

A few questions later, someone discussed the team’s move to Unreal Engine 5 and whether we could expect a shorter release cadence for the planned Ciri trilogy.

“In a way, yes, I do believe that further games should be delivered in a shorter period of time – as we had stated before, our 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.”

In other words, if The Witcher 4 releases in 2027, CD Project Red Aims to have the final game released by 2033.

That’s an ambitious statement for a company that has struggled to meet its own release dates in the past. If they pull it off, they’ll have managed to successfully launch three games in nearly the same span of time it takes them to announce and release just 1 title.

Of course, building the first game is the most time consuming part of the process. Once that’s done, it speeds up development of any sequels, because unless you drastically change things, many of the tools, features, mechanics and assets can be reused. Still, it’s going to be a challenge within an industry where triple-A development times have skyrocketed. If the team can pull it off, I will be deeply impressed.