CD Projekt Red Admits Cyberpunk 2077 Launch Was For Sure Wrong, Pitches Witcher 4 as the Reset

Almost six years after the December 2020 launch that nearly broke CD Projekt Red, joint CEO Michal Nowakowski has stopped hedging. In a fresh sit-down with The Game Business, the studio boss plainly said releasing Cyberpunk 2077 in the state it shipped was the wrong call. There was no investor conspiracy forcing the date, no shadowy board member leaning on QA to ship the build. It was just a tired team in the middle of a pandemic who decided, wrongly, that pushing the game out the door was better than waiting one more quarter. The interview, picked up across GameSpot, IGN, PC Gamer, and Rock Paper Shotgun within hours, has finally given fans the on-the-record confession the studio has been dodging since Sony pulled the game off the PlayStation Store and refund lines wrapped around forums.

What Nowakowski actually said

Nowakowski did not apologize in a fluffy, press-release way. He said the quiet part out loud: the decision to launch was wrong, period, and CD Projekt Red is not trying to rewrite history. The original mistake, in his telling, was not malice or corporate greed but exhaustion. The team had been grinding through the most grueling stretch of Cyberpunk 2077's development during COVID, and inside the studio the pressure to call it done was coming from the developers themselves, not the finance team. He pushed back specifically on the persistent theory that investors pushed the launch date to lock in holiday-quarter revenue, arguing that the motivation was far more human and far more embarrassing: the staff were tired and wanted to be done.

That distinction matters, even if it is uncomfortable. Rock Paper Shotgun's Oisin Kuhnke was quick to point out the contradiction. If the team was tired, that was in large part because mandatory crunch had reportedly been reinstated in the months before launch, a reversal of what CD Projekt Red had publicly committed to when the studio originally asked the world to pre-order the game. What individual developers wanted and what they were required to do were probably not the same thing, and the CEO framing the launch as an organic team decision sidesteps that reality. It is still the most direct admission we have ever heard from the studio, but it is also a careful one.

Why this matters now

Cyberpunk 2077 has sold more than 40 million copies since launch, and the Phantom Liberty expansion plus a long list of post-launch patches turned the game from a meme into one of the more impressive comeback stories in modern PC gaming. The technical mess has been patched into something most players would call a finished product, and Night City now actually runs the way the trailers promised back in 2018. That is the redemption arc Nowakowski wants to point at. The Witcher 4, currently targeting a 2028 release, is supposed to be the next test of whether the studio learned anything from that stretch. If CD Projekt Red can ship a marquee single-player RPG without a launch catastrophe, the Cyberpunk 2077 disaster starts to look less like a defining failure and more like a lesson the company absorbed in public.

The problem is that CD Projekt Red has spent the last couple of years saying much the same thing. Joint CEO Adam Badowski told Kotaku in 2025 that the studio had still not fully repaired the damage from Cyberpunk 2077's launch, and CDPR co-founder Marcin Iwinski used his GDC appearance the following year to publicly acknowledge that the company had lost the faith of some players forever. Every one of those mea culpas pointed forward to a Witcher 4 that would prove the point. The new interview with Nowakowski is the cleanest version of that argument yet, but it is not new information. It is the same narrative, told more bluntly, and it lands in a 2026 where the studio's other big swing, The Witcher 3 Remastered, is on the docket for September and a brand-new expansion named Songs of the Past is penciled in for 2027.

Community reaction

Reaction across the gaming side of social media has been mixed, which is the polite way of saying a chunk of fans are not buying it. The RPS comment thread on the Nowakowski interview fills up fast with people pointing out that an apology six years late is still a corporate calculation, not a genuine reckoning. PC Gamer's coverage pulled similar heat from readers who noted that the Witcher 4 line is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the conversation: if CD Projekt Red ships another broken RPG in 2028, this interview becomes the headline of a much harsher story. The more sympathetic take, voiced in quieter replies and on Discord servers, is that Nowakowski finally said what needed to be said, that admitting the mistake matters even if the timing is convenient, and that the redemption arc only counts if it holds up on day one of Witcher 4.

The Critical Pixel take

Credit where it is due: Nowakowski could have stonewalled, deflected, or hid behind a PR agency, and instead he walked into a print interview and said the launch was wrong. That is more honesty than we got from the original launch window, and it is the version of CD Projekt Red fans have been asking for since 2020. The cynical read is also fair, though. This is a publicity cycle, and it happens to land in the same month as Witcher 3 Remastered and a Witcher 4 hype window. The redemption story holds up only if Witcher 4 ships clean. Until then, every interview like this is just the studio telling us the lesson it learned while it hands us the same patched-up game we bought six years ago and asks us to believe in the next one.

The harder truth is that mandatory crunch does not square with the team-just-wanted-to-ship framing, and CD Projekt Red has not addressed that gap on the record. If Witcher 4 ships in 2028 without a public no-crunch commitment, this interview becomes the most polished piece of damage control the studio has ever produced. If it ships clean and on time, the Cyberpunk 2077 disaster becomes the scar that taught the studio how to lead a single-player RPG into a release window in one piece. Either way, the industry is watching, and the studio finally said the part out loud. That counts for something, even if it is only the opening line of a much longer story.