BioWare Veteran Mark Darrah Says CD Projekt RED Is in a “Really Dangerous Position” Over Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk Sequel Costs

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah, who worked on the Dragon Age franchise and Anthem, says CD Projekt RED (CDPR) is in a “really dangerous position.” CDPR is now presumed to need very large sales to start making a profit.

Darrah shared his concerns about the AAA industry in an interview with Summer Eternal Anthology.

He pointed out that the games industry has become too narrowly specialized and that teams keep growing. As an example, he described a typical AAA situation: “No one can add anything to an AAA game alone. It takes at least five people.”

Larger teams bring higher running costs, including salaries, office rent, equipment, and software. Darrah explains that such big teams are more vulnerable to missed deadlines, and delays are very expensive:

If you have a team of 500 people and you fall a month behind schedule, that most likely adds 5-10 million to the budget right away. It doesn’t take much for [a missed deadline] to happen. It is very easy for a team of 500 people to fall a month behind schedule just because of small hiccups in the workflow.

The creators of The Witcher 4 and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel are in a "dangerous position": the Anthem creator assesses CD Projekt RED's prospects — Image source: CD Projekt RED

Darrah believes the market will eventually split. In his words: “GTA VI will break away and pull 5-6 more games up with it, into a top league where you can spend as much on development as you like and everything will be fine.” Many other players in the market will not be able to afford that. Darrah noted that too many projects with a $100 million budget fail to pay off, and their creators will have to stop trying to compete with such giants.

In the same interview, Darrah voiced concerns about the future of CD Projekt RED, which is working on The Witcher 4 and a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. In his view, the studio now belongs to the same “top league” of games like GTA VI, and “now [CDPR’s] games need to sell 15-20 million copies to make money.” Darrah believes this puts CDPR in a “really dangerous position.”

Overall, though, Darrah is quite optimistic. If the market splits this way, he expects to see many more studios the size of Sandfall Interactive, the developer of the acclaimed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Studios typically keep specialists for every required discipline on staff, while Sandfall used outsourcing wisely to expand its capabilities.

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