The accepted story about The Witcher 4 is that Cyberpunk 2077 broke REDengine and CD Projekt gave up on it. The studio's co-chief executive says that reading is wrong, and his explanation is more interesting than the myth.
"A lot of people think like this, but this is a bit of a false assumption," Michal Nowakowski said on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast, in remarks relayed by PC Gamer. "Because the issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself."
The stated reason is a question of what the company is for
Nowakowski's argument is about identity rather than engineering. "The dream of the company was actually never to make technology," he said. CD Projekt wanted to ship games that looked and ran at the front of the field, and for a long time building its own engine looked like the way to get there. What drives the studio, in his telling, is "telling the stories in the most convincing and immersive way."
The turning point was watching The Matrix Awakens, Epic's Unreal Engine 5 demonstration. Leadership concluded that licensing would get them further than continuing to fund an engine team. "If we form a relationship with Unreal and if we work on certain things which are specifically required to make games of the size and scope and certain technicalities about it that we need for games, it could actually work."
There is a version of this that is simply true. Maintaining a proprietary engine means paying permanently for tools, documentation, renderer updates and platform ports that a licensee gets included. For a studio that ships a major game every several years, that cost lands whether or not anything is in production.
The part of the deal that is unusual
What CD Projekt negotiated is not a standard licence. Nowakowski describes a strategic collaboration in which the studio shapes where Unreal goes rather than waiting for releases.
"We're actually, I think, the only team in the world outside of Epic that deals with the inside of the 'black box' that the engine is," he said. "Nobody else is doing that except for us and them, which we do through collaborative efforts together."
That is the claim worth tracking, because Unreal Engine 5 has a well-earned reputation for stuttering in shipped games, and the causes are structural: shader compilation, streaming behaviour and traversal hitching that show up in title after title regardless of studio. If a partner working inside the source can get those fixed upstream, every other Unreal developer benefits. If CD Projekt's influence only produces features shaped around one open-world RPG, the arrangement is a private advantage dressed as collaboration.
The open question is how far the access reaches. Unreal Engine 6 is being built with much heavier AI tooling, and Nowakowski has previously said the company is not planning to rely on AI making complete games. Whether a studio with that position gets a vote on the direction of an AI-first engine is a genuine test of what strategic collaboration means.
Why studios are getting out of the engine business
CD Projekt is not an outlier. The industry has spent three years discovering that maintaining infrastructure is the first thing to look expensive when revenue stops growing, and engine teams are expensive in exactly the way that shows up badly in a downturn. The same pressure that is reshaping headcount across North American and European studios makes a licence fee look like a bargain next to a permanent staff of graphics programmers.
The trade is real, though. A studio on its own engine can build a feature nobody else can copy. A studio on Unreal ships faster, hires more easily, and competes on content. Blizzard is making the equivalent choice in a different register by extending Warcraft 3 into a bridge toward WoW rather than starting fresh. Leverage what exists, spend the saved money on the part players actually see.
For The Witcher 4, the practical question is not which engine is underneath. It is whether the game stutters on release, because that is the failure Unreal is known for and the one CD Projekt has promised its partnership can fix.