CD Projekt Red has more than 30 people working on a game nobody outside the studio knows anything about. That number is going up.
Karolina Gnas, CD Projekt Red’s vice president of investor relations, told investors on the company’s earnings call Wednesday that the team behind the unannounced ‘Project Hadar’ plans “to hire more, up to 50 developers by the end of this year.”
That’s the whole disclosure. A staffing target, a code name and not much else.
What Hadar actually is right now
Not much, by the studio’s own description. “Right now, the team is mostly focused on testing different approaches, ideas, and, you know, prototyping some gameplay element, and this is it,” Gnas said. “Hadar is still in the concept phase.”
So don’t start building a release calendar around it. Concept phase at a studio this size means people in rooms arguing about what the thing should feel like.
Guessing at the genre is a losing game. The Witcher is a third-person fantasy RPG. Cyberpunk is a first-person RPG shooter. The studio has done both, which means the only safe bet is that Hadar is an RPG of some caliber.
The Witcher 1 remake got pushed aside
CDPR also confirmed the remake of The Witcher 1 is on hold. The resources are going to The Witcher 4 instead, which the studio is targeting for a 2028 release, and to Songs of the Past, the Witcher 3 expansion announced a full decade after the base game.
Putting a remake on ice to feed the mainline sequel is a reasonable trade. It’s also a reminder of how much this studio has stacked up.
The full pile of in-development projects
Count them. The Witcher 3 Remastered is due out this month, The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past is coming, The Witcher 4 is targeting 2028, a Cyberpunk sequel is in the works, the Witcher 1 remake is paused but not dead and Project Hadar is somewhere at the concept stage behind all of it.
The remaster comes with the part players care about most. Existing owners get the upgrade free, and your old save files will work.
That last detail says more about how CDPR wants to be seen right now than any code name does.
