CD Projekt’s development expenditures hit nearly $40 million in H1, as Project Polaris (The Witcher) team gets bigger

Financial highlights for H1 2023

• According to its latest earnings release, CD Projekt reached PLN 325.2 million ($79.2 million) in revenue, down 14% year-over-year.
• 73% of the total came directly from game sales, of which 88.6% were digital units. CD Projek’ts first-party titles accounted for 73.2% of its H1 revenue.
• North America accounted for 64.7% of total sales, followed by Europe (21.8%) and Asia (7.43%).
• Net profit fell 19.8% year-over-year to PLN 91.2 million ($22.2 million). There was also a 28% decrease in operating profit, which reached PLN 99 million ($24.1 million) in H1 2023.

Team structure and games in the pipeline

• According to CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz, the company’s expenditures on development projects reached PLN 160 million ($39 million) for the first half of the year. This mostly relates to the “most intensive phase of Phantom Liberty development” and the work on the next Witcher game (codenamed Project Polaris).

• As can be seen in the image below, the team working on the next Witcher game is getting bigger.
• According to Reuters, almost 260 devs are now working on Project Polaris. After the launch of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, which involves about 300 employees, the new Witcher team will grow even more.

CD Projekt RED’s team structure (as of July 31, 2023)

• At the same time, there were decreases in the size of the teams of Project Sirius (due to a recent reboot of the project and layoffs at developer The Molasses Flood) and GWENT (due to upcoming end of content support for the game and layoffs).
• During an earnings call, CD Projekt noted that Phantom Liberty will be the only expansion to Cyberpunk 2077 due to the company’s transition to Unreal Engine 5 from its proprietary REDengine.
• CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński also said that the company is “very happy” with pre-orders of Phantom Liberty.