CD Projekt

• 1. Introduction

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  CD Projekt began in May 1994 with only $2,000 and a friend's flat that served as a rent-free office. Two Poles, Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński, founded the Warsaw company. Both had been selling games, and neither had ever built one. How does a business that starts with so little grow into one of the best-known names in video games? What kept it alive when the money ran out? And what happens when a studio's promises run ahead of what it can deliver?

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• 2. From Stalls to Translations

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  In a Warsaw marketplace, Marcin Iwiński sold cracked copies of Western video games while he was still in high school. Street stalls like his were common in the newly established and aggressively privatised Third Polish Republic of the 1990s. Iwiński later recalled that games had been scarce in his childhood in the Polish People's Republic, a country marked in the 1980s by political unrest, martial law and goods shortages. In high school he met Michał Kiciński, who was also selling games and became his business partner.

  Wanting to do business legitimately, the pair began importing games from US retailers. They became the first importers of CD-ROM games in Poland. Once the country moved toward a market-based economy in the early 1990s, they set up their own company.

  Translation became their edge. They were among the first in Poland to localize games, and Iwiński said most of their products went to "mom-and-pop shops". Partial localization began in 1996 for developers such as Seven Stars and Leryx-LongSoft, and full-scale localization followed a year later. Ace Ventura was one early success. Earlier localized games had sold only in the hundreds of copies, while Ace Ventura sold in the thousands.

  Baldur's Gate put the method to a bigger test. The founders approached BioWare and Interplay Entertainment because they expected the game to be popular in Poland. They also believed no retailer could translate its English text into Polish. To raise its profile, they added items to the packaging and hired well-known Polish actors to voice the characters. On release day, 18,000 units shipped, which beat the average for other games at the time.

  The Gothic series came next. CD Projekt published the Polish releases of Gothic in 2002 and Gothic II in 2003, and both did well. The company won Business Gazelle awards in 2003 and 2004. Its own developers later described Gothic as a primary influence on a game series they had not yet imagined making.

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• 3. Building The Witcher

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  Six months after work began on a PC version of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Interplay ran into financial trouble and cancelled it. CD Projekt had hired Sebastian Zieliński, who had developed Mortyr 2093-1944, and Adam Badowski for the port. The cancelled game left the company owning working code. The founders also felt their enthusiasm for distribution fading, and they wondered whether to keep distributing or start making games.

  They chose a series based on Andrzej Sapkowski's Wiedźmin books, which were popular in Poland, and the author accepted their proposal. The rights had passed to Metropolis Software in 1997. That studio built a playable first chapter and then abandoned it. CD Projekt acquired the rights in 2002. According to Iwiński, he and Kiciński had no idea how to develop a video game at that point.

  To make it, the company formed CD Projekt Red in Łódź in 2002, headed by Zieliński. Its demonstration game was a top-down role-playing game, similar to Dark Alliance and Diablo, that ran on the engine behind Mortyr. Badowski later called it "a piece of crap". Iwiński and Kiciński pitched it to several publishers without success. The Łódź office closed, and everyone except Zieliński moved to the Warsaw headquarters. Zieliński then left, and Kiciński took over the project.

  The demo was dropped. The team had differing ideas and no overall direction, so the game went back to the drawing board in 2003. Unfamiliar with game development, the team spent nearly two years organising production. BioWare helped by giving them space in its booth, next to Jade Empire, at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo. BioWare also licensed its Aurora engine to the studio.

  The budget outgrew the plan. A team of 15 swelled to about 100, at a cost of 20 million złoty. Some content was cut for cost, but the characters' personalities survived. Translating the Polish text into English proved difficult. Atari agreed to publish. After five years, the game was reaching an international audience, so the company adopted the English name The Witcher, coined by Adrian Chmielarz. It came out in 2007 to generally positive reviews.

  The next project, a console version, would nearly sink the company.

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• 4. Edge of Ruin

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  The Witcher: White Wolf was meant to be a console version of the first game. The team had been designing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and experimenting with consoles for a new engine. That work stopped when the port began. CD Projekt partnered with the French studio Widescreen Games, but the project slid into development limbo.

  Widescreen demanded more people, money and time, and complained that it was not being paid. Iwiński countered that CD Projekt had paid the French studio more than it paid its own staff. The team cancelled the project. Atari, unhappy, demanded repayment for funding the port. Iwiński settled by agreeing that Atari would publish the next game in North America. In 2008 the company also acquired Metropolis Software.

  The dispute proved costly. The company faced bankruptcy, and the 2008 financial crisis made things worse. To stay afloat, the team focused on The Witcher 2 and built it on the engine it had planned for The Witcher 3. That engine was called Red Engine. Once it was finished, the game could be ported to other consoles. To free up people, CD Projekt suspended Metropolis' first-person shooter, titled They.

  After three-and-a-half years of development, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings arrived in 2011. Critics praised it, and it sold more than 1.7 million copies. The company had survived, and its next goal was far larger.

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• 5. Wild Hunt

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  Avoiding the label "Witcher 2.5" was a stated aim for the third game. After The Witcher 2, CD Projekt wanted an open-world game of similar quality with added features. It chose to release only on PC and eighth-generation consoles to push the graphics. That sparked debate on the team, because some wanted to release on older consoles to maximise profit.

  The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt took three-and-a-half years and cost over $81 million. One report alleged that the team had to crunch extensively for a year to hit deadlines. After multiple delays, the game was released in May 2015 to critical praise, and it won various Game of the Year awards. It sold six million copies in its first six weeks. In the first half of 2015 it gave the studio a profit of 236 million złoty, or $62.5 million.

  The team shipped 16 free downloads and two paid expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. They decided it would be the last game in the series to star Geralt. In May 2016, game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said he hoped to return to the series someday but had nothing planned. By 2017 the Witcher series had sold over 33 million copies. A spin-off built on the card game inside The Witcher 3, Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, came out in 2018.

  Success funded growth. In March 2016 the company announced another role-playing game and plans to double the size of its Red division. In March 2018 it announced a studio in Wrocław, acquired from Strange New Things and led by former Techland COO Paweł Zawodny. In August 2018 it founded Spokko, a mobile studio.

  Goodwill from players ran high, yet working conditions drew scrutiny after unhappy employees flooded the company's Glassdoor profile with negative reviews. Iwiński replied that the studio's approach to making games "is not for everyone".

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• 6. Cyberpunk and Fallout

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  Cyberpunk 2077 was first introduced in May 2012. It is an open-world role-playing game based on the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop system created by Mike Pondsmith. Anticipation, combined with the Netflix Witcher series, helped make CD Projekt the most valuable video game company in Europe in May 2020, ahead of Ubisoft.

  The game suffered multiple delays, with the team insisting it would not ship until ready. The studio first introduced a "non-obligatory crunch" model to ease the strain on developers' personal lives. Eventually it made crunch mandatory, with all developers working six-day weeks. The game was released in December 2020.

  The PC version drew generally positive reviews and became one of the biggest PC launches ever. Pre-orders alone recouped the development cost. The console versions told another story, with technical issues and bugs, and some players called them unplayable. The studio was accused of hiding their state during marketing. On the 18th of December 2020, the game was removed from the PlayStation online store. Kiciński acknowledged that the console marketing had eroded players' trust and promised patches.

  In early February 2021, ransomware hit CD Projekt Red. The attackers took source code for several games, including Gwent, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, along with administrative files. They demanded a large sum within days. The company told the press, "We will not give in to the demands or negotiate with the actor". It said no personal information was taken and that it was working with law enforcement. The code was auctioned on the dark web, and the auction closed when the attackers said they had received a satisfying offer. Within a week it spread online, and the company began sending DMCA takedown notices.

  In May 2021, Tomaszkiewicz resigned after an internal investigation into workplace bullying allegations found him not guilty. He founded his own studio and began developing The Blood of Dawnwalker. In December 2021, CD Projekt agreed to pay $1.85 million while negotiating to settle a class-action lawsuit over the problematic Cyberpunk 2077 release.

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• 7. Games Without Locks

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  In 2008 the company launched Good Old Games, now known as GOG.com, to help players find older titles. Its strategy was to sell games free of digital rights management. Preserving old games meant untangling licensing issues for defunct developers or negotiating distribution rights with publishers. To recover old code for modern platforms, the team had to work from retail versions or second-hand copies. The service later partnered with small developers and large publishers, including Activision, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, and in 2012 it expanded to cover new AAA and independent games.

  Managing director Guillaume Rambourg said suspicions had circled it as a "doomed project". Yet GOG.com sold 690,000 copies of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt redeemed through the service. That beat the second-largest digital seller, Steam, at roughly 580,000, and all other PC digital services combined. As of the 8th of July 2019, a third of Cyberpunk 2077 digital pre-orders came through GOG.com. Its income, known internally as CD Projekt Blue, went to CD Projekt Red.

  The same philosophy shaped the games. CD Projekt Red opposes digital rights management and argues it fails to stop piracy. Its evidence came from The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, whose first release included such protection and was pirated over 4.5 million times. The DRM-free re-release was pirated far less. The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 both shipped without it, and the team argues free downloadable extras should be an industry standard.

  In 2025, the platform was sold to Michał Kiciński, one of the company's co-founders.

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• 8. Independence and Reorganisation

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  In 2009, CD Projekt's then-parent company, CDP Investment, announced plans to merge with Optimus S.A. The goal was to turn CD Projekt into a publicly traded company. The merger closed in December 2010 with Optimus as the legal survivor, and Optimus became the current CD Projekt S.A. in July 2011. By September 2017 it was the largest publicly traded video game company in Poland. In March 2018 it joined WIG20, the index of the 20 largest companies on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. It is also listed in Frankfurt.

  Staying independent was a deliberate choice. Studio Head Adam Badowski said the studio avoided becoming a subsidiary to protect its financial and creative freedom and its ownership of projects. In 2015, Electronic Arts was rumoured to be trying to acquire CD Projekt. Iwiński denied it and said fighting for independence mattered to him. The company also publishes financial details on development, marketing and release costs, citing being "open in communication" as a core value.

  Its working method changed in March 2021. It had followed the Rockstar Games model of one large project at a time. From 2022 onward, it planned several AAA games in parallel. That year it also acquired Digital Scapes Studios in Vancouver, in March 2021, and The Molasses Flood in Boston, in October 2021.

  The technology shifted too. The studio's own REDengine had replaced BioWare's Aurora engine, and Cyberpunk 2077 used REDengine 4. On the 21st of March 2022, CD Projekt announced a partnership with Epic Games and a move to Unreal Engine 5. In April 2022 Paweł Zawodny said the choice came down to Unreal Engine 5's focus on open-world design. Epic would handle much engine-level work, leaving the studio to concentrate on its games.

  On the 6th of October 2022, the company announced several projects. They included a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel codenamed Orion and a new Witcher trilogy beginning with Polaris. They also included a remake codenamed Canis Majoris and a hybrid single-player and multiplayer game from The Molasses Flood. Active development of Gwent ended after 2023, and 30 members of its team were laid off in June 2023. On the 20th of March 2023, the company announced it would write off funds spent on Project Sirius and restart it from scratch. That May, 29 Molasses Flood employees were laid off. In July 2023, CEO Adam Kiciński said around 100 workers, 9% of the CD Projekt RED workforce, would go.

  The road ahead includes The Witcher IV, the first game of a new trilogy, which is in full production. It also includes Project Hadar, the company's first original IP, which is still in planning.

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