CD Projekt Red has spent nearly two years refusing to attach a year to The Witcher 4. That ended on August 24, when joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski used the studio’s half-year results briefing to say the game is targeting a 2028 release — and, in the same breath, that it will not be appearing at Gamescom this week.
“I know it’s a bit of a wait, and you’d love to play it sooner, but let the team cook,” Nowakowski said. “It will be worth the wait.” He also put a number on the effort behind it: more than 500 developers are currently working on the project, which he described as the studio’s biggest, boldest and most ambitious game to date.
“Targeting” is doing a lot of work in that sentence
It is worth being precise about what was actually said, because the gap between a target and a date is where CD Projekt Red has historically lived. The Witcher 3 was announced for 2014 and shipped in May 2015 after two public delays. Cyberpunk 2077 moved from April 2020 to September to November, and then still arrived in a state that took the studio two years and a rebuilt console version to recover from.
So 2028 is a stated intention from a company that has not confirmed a month, a quarter, or a platform list. Reading it as “not before 2028” is the safer interpretation. What it does usefully rule out is any scenario where the game surfaces in 2027 — a possibility that had been circulating on the back of the game’s Unreal Engine 5 tech demos looking unusually complete.
Those tech demos are still the only substantial moving footage anyone has seen. The Unreal Engine 5 showcase CD Projekt Red produced with Epic ran on a base PS5 at 60fps and was explicitly labelled as not representative of final gameplay — a demo built to prove the engine transition works, not a vertical slice. The studio moved off its in-house REDengine for this saga, which is a large part of why the runway is this long.
Not at Gamescom — but CD Projekt Red is
The timing is slightly awkward. Gamescom Opening Night Live runs tonight, and CD Projekt Red is in Cologne. The Witcher 4 simply is not part of what it is showing. The studio has said Gamescom remains part of its future plans, which is a fairly transparent way of saying: not this year, ask again.
Songs of the Past is the near-term Witcher game
What CD Projekt Red is talking about this week is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Songs of the Past, the surprise third expansion announced back in May and still slated for 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. It is co-developed with Fool’s Theory, a Polish studio staffed with veterans of the original game, and it puts players back in Geralt’s boots more than a decade after Blood and Wine supposedly closed the book on him.
That sequencing matters. If Songs of the Past lands in 2027 and The Witcher 4 targets 2028, CD Projekt Red has effectively bought itself a full year of Witcher-branded goodwill without having to move its flagship forward. It is a tidy piece of scheduling, and it is probably not an accident.
The trilogy maths still look ambitious
The wider plan has not changed: The Witcher 4 opens a new trilogy with Ciri as protagonist, and CD Projekt has previously said it wants all three games out within roughly six years of the first. Start the clock in 2028 and the trilogy closes around 2034 — a cadence the studio has never come close to hitting before, and one that depends on parts of The Witcher 5 being built in parallel with The Witcher 4’s tail end.
There is also a remake of the original 2007 Witcher in development at Fool’s Theory, plus Project Orion, the Cyberpunk sequel being built out of the studio’s North American office. CD Projekt is running more concurrent projects than at any point in its history, which is the optimistic reading of a 2028 target: the studio is no longer betting everything on one release date.
What to take away
The honest summary is that we now know slightly more than we did on Sunday, and it is not the news anyone wanted. The Witcher 4 is aiming for 2028, it has 500-plus people on it, it is not at Gamescom, and the only Witcher content with a firmer nearby window is a Witcher 3 expansion. If you were hoping to see Ciri in motion this week, that hope now has an official expiry date attached to it.
