CD Projekt RED has confirmed that The Witcher 4 is no longer releasing by 2026.
As reported by PC Gamer, Piotr Nielubowicz, the company’s CFO, shared this statement in the Q&A of the company’s latest earnings call:
“We are not going to announce the precise launch date for the game yet.
All we could share now to give more visibility to investors is that the game will not be launched within the time frame of the first target for the incentive program, which ends December 31, 2026.”
While this news is certainly disappointing, we should know better than to suddenly demand that CD Projekt RED rush their development to make their original deadline.
We won’t relitigate all of it here, but every CD Projekt RED should remember very well that the company destroyed their reputation with the botched launch of Cyberpunk 2077. The game launched with many bugs, and very poor performance on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
CD Projekt RED’s road to redemption likely cost them more than it would have to have gotten it right the first time. It took an additional five years after Cyberpunk 2077 released before they redeemed it enough to get the long desired Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam.
It must also be said that The Witcher 4 entered full production as of last November. So it may be unreasonable to expect that the game would be ready to come out in two years or less of full production. But then, there’s another possible factor that may need to be taken into consideration.
CD Projekt RED’s decision to adopt Unreal 5 to make The Witcher 4 raised some eyebrows, and rightfully so. Multiple devs have openly talked about how Unreal is not suitable for making open world games. Daniel Vávra, co-founder of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 studio Warhorse, publicly stated that he believes the engine is slowing down development on The Witcher 4.
Korean studio Pearl Abyss claimed they chose to iterate on their proprietary Black Space engine over using Unreal, because they can customize Black Space to do things Unreal can’t do. Yesterday, Pearl Abyss showed off the impressively granular details that Black Space can demonstrate on their upcoming open-world game, Crimson Desert.
So, there may be something to this criticism about their choice of game engine, but it’s also worth remembering that this is also speculation on the part of those two studios. CD Projekt RED is prudent to minimize what they reveal about The Witcher 4’s development, until they know they won’t be embarrassed with what they do show.
At this point, The Witcher 4 may end up releasing by the next console generation. Once again, while that may be disappointing to think about, it will definitely be better than getting another Cyberpunk 2077 situation. Given that The Witcher 3 also ended up becoming a cross-generation title for coming out between the transition of different console generations, it’s probably what we should have expected anyway.
