CD Projekt RED has made the uncomfortable decision to reevaluate Project Sirius.
Project Sirius was announced last October in a CD Projekt RED financial report presentation. That isn’t the game’s final name, but the code word for an upcoming spinoff game in The Witcher franchise.
What’s notable about Project Sirius is it was being developed by The Molasses Flood, a smaller developer who had previously made their name on procedurally generated survival games The Flame in the Flood and Drake Hollow.
While the genre is dominated by games like Minecraft or recent release Sons of the Forest, The Molasses Flood have a particular vision that distinguishes them in the sea of survival game developers.
It was particularly their work on Drake Hollow that convinced CD Projekt RED to acquire the studio, in the service of making games for them and their particular franchises.
Project Sirius is to be The Molasses Flood’s take on The Witcher universe, and several job listings they put out gave us an idea of what they were aiming towards. They were looking for help with world building, multiplayer co-op/PvE, combat systems, narratives, and procedural generation systems.
Some of these elements were also seen in Drake Hollow, in particular the multiplayer and procedural generation, but in that particular game, the studio also added elements like crafting, collecting, building an even tower defense.
These all sound like the elements of a promising new project. Unfortunately, as reported by Video Games Chronicle, CD Projekt RED has revealed that Project Sirius has established an impairment allowance.
In simple English, impairment is a permanent reduction in the value of a company asset. In the case of Project Sirius, it had cost CD Projekt RED $ 7.6 million to work on the game in 2022, and they had already spent $ 2.2 million this year. These amounts “will accordingly burden the [company’s] financial results”.
CD Projekt RED sums their report with this:
“The aforementioned decision is based on results of evaluation of the scope and commercial potential of the original concept of Project Sirius, and ongoing work on formulating a new framework for this project.”
Without getting into the technical accounting or business details, it seems that Project Sirius has been costing CD Projekt RED more than they expected, and these costs are not in line with what they expect the game to make, even if it is successful.
This may be a case of Project Sirius being just a little too risky, as the idea of a multiplayer survival The Witcher game might not necessarily catch on. Gwent’s release as a standalone card game may have seen initial success, but CD Projekt RED failed to push that early momentum towards making it a viable competitive or esports game.
This doesn’t mean Project Sirius is being cancelled. Unfortunately, it does mean that unfavorable business conditions mean it won’t be as big a game as CD Projekt RED originally planned it to be. Hopefully CD Projekt RED can find a way to make this a successful project in the end.
