CD Projekt Red picked its moment well. A short update from joint-CEO Michal Nowakowski landed just before Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, calling The Witcher 4 “our biggest, boldest, and most ambitious game to date” and confirming the studio is “targeting” a 2028 release. No date. No month. A year, and a verb doing an enormous amount of work.
“Targeting” is not a commitment, and nobody at CD Projekt is pretending otherwise. It is the softest possible language a public company can use while still giving investors and fans a number to hold onto. The number itself is fine. What matters is that the studio has now spent the news cycle on its own terms instead of letting a showcase trailer set expectations it can’t meet.
Three years is a long time to hold a date
Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012 and shipped in 2020, and the last stretch of that involved multiple public delays before a launch that still went badly. This is the same company, largely rebuilt, working in a new engine on a new trilogy. Unreal Engine 5 is not a familiar tool for a studio that spent a decade on REDengine. Assume slippage. Not as a cynical dig, but as the base case, because the honest read on a 2028 target from a first-in-a-trilogy RPG is that 2029 is comfortably inside the error bars.
The more useful thing to do with a 2028 target is ask what the platform landscape looks like by then, which is where the community went almost immediately.
The disc question
The reaction Eurogamer picked up was not about the wait. It was about whether The Witcher 4 will exist on a PS5 disc at all, given the direction Sony has taken on physical releases. That concern is aimed at the wrong company. Whatever CD Projekt would prefer, the availability of a physical PS5 SKU is a platform-holder decision, and a developer’s leverage over it is close to zero.
By 2028 the PS5 will be roughly eight years old. The PS4 was seven when Cyberpunk shipped for it, and that went about as well as you’d expect. So a studio that has already been burned once by supporting aging hardware past its useful life is now looking at a launch window where the current generation is almost certainly succeeded, and where committing to a disc means committing to a manufacturing and certification pipeline that may be materially smaller than it is today.
CD Projekt has said nothing about platforms for 2028. It has said very little about anything, which is the correct amount to say three years out from a target that has not been tested against a single milestone yet.
The practical takeaway for anyone budgeting their hype: treat 2028 as the earliest plausible year, not the expected one, and don’t preorder a physical edition of a game whose format nobody has confirmed exists. The next real signal will be a gameplay demo with a build attached to it. There isn’t one yet.