CD Projekt will only announce release dates when "really, really sure of it" from now

Eight years after being revealed, Cyberpunk 2077 finally hit store shelves in 2020. While the wait was long, many might also remember the unfortunate delays that hit the game during its launch year, taking apart the hugely hyped release date plan that was introduced by Keanu Reaves on stage at E3 2019. As expected, developer CD Projekt wants to avoid such blunders in the future.

"To be honest, when we were kicking off the marketing campaign officially with pre-orders, which was the Keanu on stage, the plan was actually to launch roughly one year later," says CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski in an interview with Eurogamer. "It just didn't really work."

The company hadn't planned for a such a drawn out marketing campaign when the original release date was established, per Nowakowski. "So we didn't really plan for like a two-year campaign, and I still think that one year would really be fine [in terms of] time for a promotional campaign of that game," he adds.

CD Projekt is currently ramping up the development its upcoming games, with a brand-new Witcher trilogy being its next major project. While the titles are already known to be in development, with the first game in the trilogy (codename Polaris) is now in full production, the company won't be attaching a release date to it anytime soon.

Following the Cyberpunk debacle, Nowakowski says that the studio has "learned a lot of good practices from that experience: so announce the date when you're like really, really sure of it."

Pointing at the successful launch of Cyberpunk 2077's lone expansion Phantom Liberty, Nowakowski adds that its six month promotional campaign worked well. However, for full-blown games, the company wants to have a "slightly longer - but not two-year - lasting campaign."

He is talking the point at which the studio begins accepting pre-orders and locks in a launch date for an upcoming experience. Reveals and teasers will still arrive earlier to build the hype slowly.

"If I ask you, what do you know about The Witcher 4? The answer is not much, probably," continues the joint CEO. "So we want to drop the crumbs here and there so that people — and the media as well — can, you know, pick up on it and try to figure out what it is we're trying to say this time."

Despite all its troubles, Cyberpunk 2077 has so far sold over 30 million copies, just four years into its launch. Aside from more Witcher games, the studio is also developing a sequel set in the sci-fi RPG universe.