CD Projekt RED has shared a small update on the status of the next Cyberpunk 2077 game.
In a video message, CD Projekt RED CFO Piotr Nielubowicz revealed that:
“The past six months were also a busty time for our new studio in Boston. There, a group of CD Projekt RED veterans, now assisted by freshly hired talented developers, is laying the groundwork for another Cyberpunk game, codenamed Orion.”
They also revealed in their presentation to investors that their Boston studio has ramped up ever so slightly, from 56 to 60 members. That’s less than one-tenth of the company’s overall 639 member staff, and a far cry from the 439 staff who are now working on The Witcher 4.
So this game is clearly still at the very earliest phases of development. They’re far from the proper production schedule, and are likely still at the prototyping and conceptual stage. As eager as fans and investors are to see this game release soon, it is unlikely that CD Projekt RED will rush headlong into it again.
Following the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, the company learned the hard lesson of prioritizing making good games for the fans, over rushing to meet production deadlines, for the first time.
It took them two years to roll their mistakes back, with the 2022 release of the game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. They also updated the version of the game on PC, for players on Steam and GOG, and chose not to bring the game back to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Today, it has been one year since they released Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty, an expansion that turned out to be so huge and far-reaching, that players asked around if they had to start their game over to experience it.
So if you’re wondering why we don’t know anything about Project Orion until now, the answer is that CD Projekt RED is literally still figuring that out right now. If we don’t expect The Witcher 4 to come out for a few years, we can expect it will take even longer for Project Orion to come out. We think it’s safe to say that Project Orion is coming to the tenth generation of consoles, at the earliest. The Witcher 4 might not come until that generation too, and so Orion’s fate is tied up to that game as well.
In any case, all we want is for CD Projekt RED to keep making games, and that means they have to remember to do it in a way that’s sustainable, and gives us a great product in the end. We can all afford to wait for them to make sure they get all of that right.
