CD Projekt Confirms Project Sirius Layoffs as the Witcher Multiplayer Spinoff Shrinks Again

Four years after CD Projekt Red announced it was building a Witcher spin-off with co-op, the studio has confirmed another round of layoffs on Project Sirius. Kotaku first reported the cuts on August 12, and IGN quickly locked down a statement from CD Projekt confirming the numbers. The studio says nine people are out, four in Boston and five in Warsaw, with another nine being invited to apply for roles elsewhere inside the company. Project Sirius was sitting at 83 staff as of April 30, so the team just lost roughly a quarter of its body in one afternoon.

Sirius is the game CD Projekt Red has been trying not to talk about since 2022. It lives at The Molasses Flood, the Boston studio CDPR bought in 2021 to expand into North American development. The pitch when it was revealed was a Witcher universe game with single-player campaign beats and multiplayer on top, aimed at a broader audience than the studio's usual open-world RPGs. Three years later nobody outside the studio has seen a single second of gameplay, and CDPR has stopped pretending the project is on a normal timeline.

Another Round in a Pattern of Restarts

This is the second formal layoff wave on Sirius in three years. Back in 2023, 29 developers were cut and CDPR openly said the project had a new framework after a full development restart. Even before that the project was clearly wobbling, with CDPR confirming in March 2023 that it was reassessing the whole thing. Through all of that, The Molasses Flood kept a small core and tried to ship something concrete. The team recently brought in Kwan Perng, a veteran Destiny 2 writer, as a new lead narrative voice, and CDPR's own April 30 headcount suggested the project was at least stable in size if not in direction.

That stability was the headline CDPR was quietly leaning on. Now it's gone. The official line in CDPR's statement is that the cuts are about right-sizing for the project's current stage of development, which is the standard polite phrasing studios use when a game is in trouble. There is no public cancellation, and CDPR is still calling Sirius an active project, but the pattern of two layoffs in three years and zero gameplay in four is the kind of thing that earns a project a reputation, fair or not.

Why the Rest of CDPR Does Not Care

The interesting context is that Project Sirius is a rounding error inside CD Projekt Red right now. The studio's actual money and attention are pinned to four other projects, and the public headcount makes that clear. The Witcher 4 (codenamed Polaris) is the big one at 513 staff. Cyberpunk 2 (codenamed Orion) is next at 163. The original IP Project Hadar has 24 people quietly sketching. There is also a Witcher 3 expansion in the works for next year and a Witcher 1 remake being built at Fool's Theory. Sirius's remaining 65 people are the smallest of any active CDPR development team by a long way.

CDPR has been equally open that the multi-game Witcher plan is the studio's future. The current roadmap is to ship The Witcher 4, The Witcher 5, and The Witcher 6 in a six-year window. That is an extremely tight window for a studio that has been visibly struggling to get one extra-spinoff out the door, and it is part of why expansions for The Witcher 4 are already off the table. There is no slack left in the calendar to chase a co-op spin-off that has not moved in four years.

Community Reaction: Pity, Not Panic

Reaction on Twitter is muted and largely sympathetic. The loudest takes boil down to disappointment that CDPR ever greenlit a co-op Witcher game in the first place. One reply on the IGN thread summed up a common read: layoffs for a project no one wants, in a genre that is already overstuffed, during a time when interest in the broader Witcher IP is slipping. That is a brutal but fair assessment. A few replies wished the affected developers well, which is the right thing to say, but the goodwill is not going to move the needle at CDPR's headquarters.

The Witcher subreddit has been more resigned than angry. A long-running thread on the broader CDPR strategy has been calling for Sirius to be put out of its misery since 2024, arguing that the studio's bandwidth is finite and every dev on Sirius is a dev not on Polaris. The cuts on Tuesday look like the studio agreeing with that math, in slow motion, in a way nobody wants to write in a press release.

What Happens Next

Short term, Project Sirius will keep existing as a smaller team at The Molasses Flood with a leaner brief. CDPR is not going to cancel it publicly because that would force an investor conversation about writedowns, and the studio has spent the last two years trying to be boring in the best possible way. The most likely path is a quiet 2027 or 2028 reveal with a much smaller scope, probably single-player first with the co-op layer either cut or significantly reduced, and a launch that gets talked about in the same breath as every other troubled CDPR timeline in the last decade.

The bigger question is what this means for The Molasses Flood as a studio. Boston-based CDPR development has not shipped a single game since the acquisition, and the studio is now down to 65-ish people after two layoffs in three years. At some point CDPR has to decide whether it is keeping the Boston office as a real engine of new games or quietly winding it into a satellite support studio for Polaris. Today's cuts do not answer that, but they make the question louder. For the people who lost their jobs on Tuesday, none of that matters today. For the rest of the industry, it is yet another reminder that co-op spin-offs in established single-player franchises are still the riskiest bet in the room.