The Witcher: Developer hemorrhage after Cyberpunk 2077, the technical team is to be refounded

Cyberpunk 2077 has created many problems for CD Projekt Red, many well-known and some less well-known. Speaking with one of our internal sources, who wanted to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, but who had already told us in the past about facts that proved to be true, in recent months there has been real bleeding of developers, especially in the technical field, which forced to re-establish a large part of the team that will take care of the new The Witcher.

We have already talked about the fact in the special in which we examine why the Polish studio has chosen to use Unreal Engine 5, but it is worth underlining it, bringing it back separately.

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After Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red has lost several developers for three fundamental reasons: the first is the crunch that lasted for years, which burned many people, leading them to leave in search of better working conditions. The second is that the switch to the engine stock, that is the Unreal Engine, led to major bleeding of developers from the technical team working on the Red Engine. Translation: many have left, as they are no longer needed, as that engine will no longer be used.

The third reason is work from home: the possibility of working from home for programmers, designers and many other professionals involved in video game development, has allowed the former CD Projekt RED to access the European market, where salaries are enormously better. than those offered by the Polish firm, which pays according to local standards. Lately, salaries have also become high in CDPR, but they are always lower than those paid, for example, by English and French studios. This last point has led to many dropouts.

The move to Unreal Engine 5 offers the prospect of being able to put a smaller team on the engine, reduce the number of programmers and focus more on designers, thanks to blueprints (an internal system of the engine). Consider that designers cost less than programmers, so apparently CD Projekt RED will save a lot from this point of view. Unfortunately, it must be said that productions such as The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 are currently unmanageable with the Unreal Engine 5 base, which will be rewritten in many parts.

To do this, engine programmers will have to be hired. So they will have to put blueprints aside, because they tend to be 10 to 100 times slower than code written in C ++, hiring programmers for the gameplay. In order to attract people, they will also have to adjust their wages to foreign ones, increasing production costs considerably. They will also have to guarantee work from home because, with everything that is happening in Eastern Europe, no one would ever move to Poland and be able to work from home for others.

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