Mysterious

The headcounts of both The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2’s dev teams continue to steadily climb, as the two RPGs inch closer to our fingertips. Meanwhile, CD Projekt have confirmed that their research division are still busy deciding what the mysterious original game codenamed Project Hadar will look like.

All of these details, plus some Nintendo Switch stuff we’ve avoided hearing by sticking our mouse and keyboard-focused fingers in our ears, were revealed in the Polish publishers’ financial report covering the first half of 2025.

First, the big guns. As outlined by the handy chart below, The Witcher 4 had 422 people working on it as of April 30 and saw that number grow to 444 people by the close of July, while Cyberpunk 2 has hopped over the three digit threshold in that time, going from 96 chooms to 116. Oh bugger, sorry for dropping the c-bomb, that Cyberpunk playthrough I’m still on with is clearly getting to me.

“Our recruitment efforts have significantly sped up over the last three months, and as a result the total number of talented developers working across our projects has grown by 10%, reaching almost 800 people,” CD Projekt joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski explained in a presentation to investors. It’s worth noting that this current growth follows the studio laying off staff back in 2023, with some remaining workers deciding to unionise as a result.

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With Cyberpunk 2 now having fully moved from the research section of CD Projekt’s books into the development section – it’s been in pre-production for a little while now – the mysterious Project Hadar’s the most expensive research project CD Projekt have on the go. While we have some sense now of The Witcher 4, Cyberpunk 2, and Molasses Flood’s Witcher spin-off Project Sirius, Hadar remains an enigma several years on from its initial announcement back in 2022.

We know it’s going to be an original story, and some job listings have suggested that it’s an action RPG with melee combat. Nowakowski’s also been weirdly specific in ruling out that it’s a “cosmic horror in feudal Japan”. Aside from that, shrug emoji. Though, with Hadar’s 22 person strong team now looking to be the main focus of CD projekt’s research department, the company’s investors are clearly as curious for more info on it as we are.

In the call accompanying these financials, one of them rather bluntly asked whether any decisions regarding the game’s future would be made by the end of this year or 2026. Nowakowski seemed a bit taken aback by the idea of sharing more so soon.

“Hadar is still basically an IP concept, so not a game development project yet,” he responded. “We’re working on the game’s story, its background – so to say; there is some prototyping going on in terms of gameplay, because it’s hard not to do that when the end goal is to make a video game – but I’m not sure what you mean by ‘decisions’ – I mean, as in to progress to development, or whether we’re going to make [a game] or not…? We want to make this IP happen, so that decision is sort of made in terms of – when we’re going to go into development, we will announce it in due time, I think.”

You could argue it’s been a bit of a strange move for CD Projekt to have announced Hadar at the same time they did the fresh Witcher trilogy and Cyberpunk 2, if they were still going to be at this early a stage with it nearly three years down the line. Then again, that kind of transparency’s great for us journos and has probably helped CD Projekt recruit folks to work on Hadar. My money’s on it being a Keanu Reeves gacha game with 4X strategy elements and a roguelike mode based around the concept of the word ‘woah’.

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