The Witcher Trilogy's Six-Year Clock Hasn't Started Yet

CD Projekt Red wants players to believe the next Witcher trilogy will arrive on a tight six-year schedule. The catch is that the clock has not started yet, and it will not start until The Witcher 4 actually ships. That single detail turns a reassuring promise into a much longer wait than most fans have assumed.

The Six-Year Promise Starts at a Later Number Than You Think

When CD Projekt Red says the next Witcher trilogy will land within six years, it sounds like a countdown that is already running. It is not. Nowakowski told press, as reported by TechSpot, that the six-year window begins once The Witcher 4 ships, and that the game "still is" on track to launch the whole trilogy within that period once it starts. The studio has also said, through the same reporting, that there is nothing unusual happening with The Witcher 4's development that would suggest a delay.

That framing matters because The Witcher 4 itself does not have a locked release date in hand yet. Wikipedia's entry on the game lists a 2028 release window for PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S, based on CD Projekt's own statements and outlet coverage. Earlier reporting from December 2025, including a ScreenRant piece that explicitly labeled it a rumor, had pointed to 2027. The date has moved later as the project has matured, which is normal for a game this size, but it also means the six-year clock has been sliding right along with it.

Do the simple math on the current 2028 figure and the picture looks very different from "trilogy wraps up soon." A launch in 2028 followed by a six-year window for three total games points to The Witcher 6 landing somewhere around 2033 or 2034, not because CD Projekt has said that date out loud, but because that is what a 2028 start plus a six-year span actually works out to. Compare that to Rockstar's approach to GTA 6, where the studio has leaned into treating a single, long-delayed release as an event rather than promising a fast follow-up trilogy.

The Real Bet Is an Engine Switch, Not a Release Schedule

The six-year pledge only works if CD Projekt can cut its own development time dramatically between entries, and the mechanism for that is a shift away from REDengine, the proprietary technology behind The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, toward Unreal Engine 5. TechSpot and ScreenRant both report the studio has been working with Epic on this transition for close to four years already, which means a meaningful chunk of the "six-year" plan has effectively already been spent on tooling rather than on any of the three games themselves.

The logic behind the switch is straightforward: a shared, widely supported engine should let CD Projekt reuse systems, tools and hired talent across The Witcher 4, 5 and 6 instead of rebuilding pipelines from scratch each time, the way REDengine projects historically required. Unreal Engine 5 also opens the door to the multiplayer ambitions behind Project Sirius, a separate Witcher-universe multiplayer game being built by external studio The Molasses Flood, according to TechSpot's reporting.

That is a reasonable bet, but it is also an unproven one at this scale. No CD Projekt game has shipped on Unreal Engine 5 yet, so the studio is promising accelerated timelines using a toolchain it has never finished a AAA release on. Engine migrations are exactly the kind of work that tends to eat the time savings it was supposed to create, especially in the first project built on the new foundation.

The Headcount Numbers Show How Big a Bet This Is

CD Projekt has more than doubled its Witcher development team to make this plan credible. Wikipedia's tracking of the studio's own disclosures puts headcount at 403 in March 2024, 499 in March 2026 and 513 by May 2026, against a Witcher 3 core team of roughly 240 people. TechSpot's independent reporting lands in the same range, describing growth from around 160 people in 2022 toward 510 as the project has scaled.

That kind of headcount growth is not free, and it lands at a studio that is still a fraction of the size of the publishers it is increasingly competing with for talent and shelf space. CD Projekt's own first-quarter 2026 results, published on its investor relations site, show 191 million zloty in revenue for the quarter, up 6% year over year, with 1.4 billion zloty in cash reserves on hand. The company's CFO said in that same report that CD Projekt is "well prepared to further intensify our parallel development work on several projects," a direct reference to running The Witcher 4, Project Sirius and the unannounced Project Hadar alongside each other.

Running three or more projects in parallel, on a new engine, while more than doubling headcount, is the same kind of structural bet that has driven this year's wave of video game industry consolidation: studios scaling up fast to compete with larger rivals, then facing painful corrections if any one of those bets does not pay off on schedule.

Who Should Pay Attention to This, and Who Can Ignore It

This matters most to two groups. Players deciding whether to wait for The Witcher 5 or 6 before buying into the new trilogy should plan around a 2028 start for the clock, not a 2026 one, and should treat any date beyond The Witcher 4 itself as a projection rather than a promise. Investors and industry watchers tracking CD Projekt as a mid-size studio competing against consolidated giants should watch the Unreal Engine 5 transition closely, since it is the single point of failure for the entire six-year pitch.

People who can safely tune this out: anyone only interested in The Witcher 4 itself does not need to track the trilogy math at all, since nothing about the sequels changes what ships in 2028. Likewise, readers who already assume big studio release-date promises slip, and who plan to simply buy the games whenever they land, will not learn much new here beyond confirmation of that instinct.

• Wait and see if you want certainty: don't set expectations for The Witcher 5 or 6 release years until CD Projekt confirms The Witcher 4's exact date.
• Treat "six years" as starting at The Witcher 4's launch, not at the announcement, when you do the math yourself.
• Watch for CD Projekt's own quarterly reports, not fan estimates, for real signals on whether the Unreal Engine 5 transition is on schedule.
• If you already assume big publisher timelines slip, this changes little for you beyond confirming the pattern.

The Honest Counterpoint: CD Projekt Has Earned Some Trust Here

The skeptical read on all of this is obvious: game studios promise ambitious release cadences constantly, and those promises break constantly. CD Projekt itself delayed Cyberpunk 2077 multiple times and shipped it in a rough state in 2020. Treating any multi-year, multi-game pledge as reliable would be naive.

But the steelman case for CD Projekt is stronger than that history suggests. The studio is not promising three brand-new, from-scratch AAA open worlds; it is promising three entries in the same universe, on the same new engine, with a team that has already spent years building shared tools rather than one-off systems. That is closer to how Interactive Entertainment franchises with genuine annual or biennial cadences operate than to CD Projekt's own past approach of one enormous, isolated project at a time. The 65 million cumulative Witcher 3 sales figure the company reported this year also gives it a large, proven audience to fund the parallel investment, unlike a studio betting its future on an unproven franchise.

Where the skepticism still holds is timing, not intent. Even if CD Projekt executes well, an engine this new and a headcount this inflated raise real odds that The Witcher 4 itself slips past 2028, which would push the entire six-year sequence later still. The honest position is that the plan is more credible than the average studio promise, but the start date it depends on is not yet locked, and everything downstream of that date is still a projection.

What to Watch Next

The single most useful thing to track over the next year is not fan speculation about Witcher 5 or 6, it is whether CD Projekt confirms a firm, undelayed date for The Witcher 4 itself. Every quarter that date holds at 2028 is a quarter of evidence that the six-year plan behind it is real rather than aspirational. Every slip pushes not just one game back, but the entire trilogy math discussed above.

For now, the trilogy pledge is best read as a statement of intent backed by real investment, not a release calendar. CD Projekt has put more than 500 people and years of engine work behind the promise, which is a meaningfully bigger commitment than a marketing line. Readers should judge the plan by The Witcher 4's actual 2028 launch when it arrives, not by the six-year framing being used to describe it today.

Sources

• TechSpot: CD Projekt Red still plans three Witcher games in six years, but the clock hasn't started yet
• Wikipedia: The Witcher IV
• ScreenRant: The Witcher 4 Trilogy: CDPR's Ambitious Six-Year Release Plan Raises Questions
• CD Projekt: CD PROJEKT wraps up the first quarter of 2026