Excitement for The Witcher franchise is at an all-time high, which may come as a surprise since The Witcher 3 is almost five years old. It just goes to show how popular The Witcher Netflix TV show is. Given that The Witcher TV show is so popular, The Witcher 3 has a record number of players, and The Witcher books are selling out, one might think it's a great time to capitalize on the brand. When asked, however, CD Projekt has restated that it has no new The Witcher games in development.
CD Projekt Red recently hosted a conference call and Q&A tied to the studio's recent delay of Cyberpunk 2077. During the Q&A CD Projekt Red was asked directly whether or not it was working on any other games. Senior VP of business development Michal Nowakowski confirmed it had one other AAA game in development in parallel with Cyberpunk 2077, that being the previously announced Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer game.
Nowakowski's comments do leave room for smaller, non-AAA projects to currently be in development at CD Projekt Red. In this case, it's possible that a smaller The Witcher game might be in development. But as for The Witcher franchise that fans are familiar with - the massive open-world action games - CD Projekt Red clearly has no room. A project the size of The Witcher would require the full Cyberpunk 2077 team to make, but it's clearly busy.
A question worth asking is whether CD Projekt Red might be playing games with its response. The company just delayed Cyberpunk 2077 out of the current fiscal year and into the next, which is bound to have major financial repercussions. The studio is reportedly going into crunch, expecting overtime from developers that may last through the game's launch in September. Even if CD Projekt Red was working on a Witcher game, it's hard to imagine it ever acknowledging it right now.
Cyberpunk 2077 is CD Projekt Red's focus for the foreseeable future. That goes through its new September release date and beyond, as the studio works on its Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer game and whatever single-player post-launch content plans it may have. With that acknowledged, a new Witcher game is a near certainty sometime in the future. CD Projekt Red recently came to a new deal with The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, enabling them to create more Witcher games. And beyond that, given the franchise's newfound success, it'd be a hell of a missed opportunity to do otherwise.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is currently available on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Source: CD Projekt Red