“Today we are overstaffed,” says CD Projekt Red boss Adam Kiciński, as the Cyberpunk 2077 announces it’s to cut 9 percent of its workforce.
Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red has some big things in production, but it’s still “overstaffed”. That’s according to CEO Adam Kiciński, who in a 26 July website post (as reported by IGN) has announced that “roughly 9%” of the studio’s workforce is to be laid off.
“There’s no easy way to say this, but today we are overstaffed,” Kiciński writes. “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 outcome is the studio parting ways with around 100 people, which is roughly 9% of the entire team.”
Kiciński adds that not all of the layoffs will be immediate, with some employees retaining their jobs into the first quarter of 2024. The announcement has been made this early, he writes, to give those affected “ample time to process and adjust”.
As Kiciński himself notes, CD Projekt Red has a large number of games in development right now. There’s Project Sirius, a multiplayer spin-off from The Witcher, which is still in production after returning to the drawing board earlier in the year. Then there’s Polaris, also based on The Witcher, Orion, an extension of the Cyberpunk universe, and Hadar, said to be an original property. This is all in addition to things like CD Projekt’s remake of the original Witcher and its ongoing work on Cyberpunk 2077, such as September’s Phantom Liberty expansion.
Those projects all, of course, require a small army of artists, developers and other staff to make them, but Kiciński says that the job cuts are about “having teams that are more agile and more effective.”
The cuts amount to around 100 people, with staff affected coming from such areas as development, publishing and admin. All told, the cost of severance packages and other expenses will amount to just over $1 million, according to IGN.
