- CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 4 is rumored to cost nearly $1 billion
- A Polish analyst claims it’s costing around $390 million apiece for development and marketing respectively
- This comes shortly after the analyst claimed new DLC is inbound for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
CD Projekt Red’s next instalment in The Witcher franchise is one that is highly anticipated, with The Witcher 4 seemingly set on heavily improving upon its predecessor’s RPG elements and realism – and it looks like the developer may be following in the footsteps of Rockstar Games with GTA 6.
And by that I mean there’s apparently a giant budget backing the RPG. As reported by TweakTown, a Polish analyst, Mateusz Chrzanowski, claims that The Witcher 4 will cost CD Projekt Red around $800 million, with supposedly $390 million spent on the game’s development – and the same amount on marketing. This is a rough estimation based on the conversion of PLN 1.4 billion to dollars.
This latest rumor comes from the same source who recently suggested that CD Projekt Red will be releasing a new DLC expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in May 2026. While there’s no clarification on that just yet, it’s worth noting that CD Projekt Red is rumored to be working on multiple projects, so it’s not a far-fetched assertion.
It’s a bigger leap to believe the claim regarding the size of the budget here, though. A spend of around $800 million for The Witcher 4 would place the title within the same ballpark as top games such as GTA 6, which going by speculation has racked up costs of up to $2 billion in its production.
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Still, it is true that major releases like these have big expectations behind them (especially GTA 6), and obviously that will come with quite a price in terms of production and marketing.
A majority of triple-A modern games have massive budgets behind them, and one notable example is Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which reportedly had a budget of $315 million.
This is a trend that has been ongoing for the past few years, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down whatsoever.
Analysis: big budgets for games aren’t always justified
Big budgets don’t always mean big successes in the games industry.
Take, for example, the case of Concord from Firewalk Studios (admittedly not a single-player game, but certainly an eye-opening affair in terms of being a high-profile failure). This reportedly cost $400 million to make, and in case you didn’t know, Concord was a massive failure that resulted in a shutdown two weeks after its launch, and the closure of the developer responsible.
This is just one of many examples of massive budgets going to waste, and while I doubt this will happen with CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 4, I still have some concerns – especially after Cyberpunk 2077‘s disastrous launch.
About the only developer I’ve seen consistently back up its production costs is Rockstar Games, with critically acclaimed launches like Red Dead Redemption 2 and, of course, GTA 5.
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