‘There’s no easy way to say this, but today we are overstaffed.’
Share this story
CD Projekt Red (CDPR), the video game studio behind franchises like The Witcher and Cyberpunk, is laying off “roughly” 9 percent of its staff, according to a Wednesday blog post. That number translates to around 100 people.
“There’s no easy way to say this, but today we are overstaffed,” CEO Adam Kiciński wrote in the post. “We have talented people on board who are finishing their tasks and — based on current and expected project needs — we already know we don’t have other opportunities for them in the next year.”
The studio has a big slate of projects in the works. Most imminently is the September 26th release of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, a major expansion starring Idris Elba. In the future, it’s planning to release a remake of the first Witcher game, a new Witcher trilogy, a Witcher spinoff codenamed “Project Sirius,” a new Cyberpunk game codenamed Orion, and an entirely new franchise codenamed Hadar. Even with that lineup, the studio is going to make some cuts.
“To meet our own high expectations and ambitions to create the best role-playing games, we not only want to have the best people but also the right teams,” Kiciński wrote. “What we mean by that is having teams that are built around our projects’ needs; teams that are more agile and more effective.” Not all of the layoffs are happening at once; Kiciński said some will be laid off “as late as Q1 2024.”
CDPR came under heavy scrutiny for instituting six-day workweeks close to the release of Cyberpunk 2077, which still didn’t prevent the game from launching in an extremely buggy state. The studio has since made internal changes as part of “an ongoing process of several deep transformations within the studio which we consider key to making quality games, on time and without crunch,” Kiciński said.
Other big gaming studios like Activision Blizzard, EA, and Niantic have also laid off staff this year.
