CD Projekt switched to Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4 by choice, not because of Cyberpunk 2077

CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has pushed back on the widespread assumption that Cyberpunk 2077's troubled launch drove the studio away from its in-house REDengine. Speaking on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast, he called that reading a "false assumption" — the decision to use Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4 was about the company's broader identity, not a reaction to one game's problems.

Nowakowski's core argument is simple: CD Projekt never wanted to be an engine studio. "The dream of the company was actually never to make technology," he said. The team built REDengine because cutting-edge visuals required it, but the real goal has always been storytelling — "telling the stories in the most convincing and immersive way." When leadership saw The Matrix Awakens tech demo for Unreal Engine 5, they decided third-party tech could finally meet that bar. From there, CD Projekt didn't just license UE5 — they negotiated a deeper arrangement with Epic. Nowakowski claims the studio is "the only team in the world outside of Epic" that works inside the engine's source at a collaborative level, shaping its direction rather than just consuming it.

The switch is significant context for a studio that built its reputation on technical ambition. REDengine powered The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, both of which pushed hardware hard and delivered visuals that defined their respective release windows. Cyberpunk's 2020 launch was genuinely disastrous on last-gen consoles, but Nowakowski is clear that the engine itself wasn't the culprit — the implication being that the scope and ambition of the project were the real pressure points. Unreal Engine 5 has its own baggage: the engine has attracted criticism across multiple releases for shader compilation stutters and inconsistent performance, issues that CD Projekt's deep collaboration with Epic may be aimed at addressing directly.

What that collaboration means for The Witcher 4 in practice remains to be seen — the game has been shown only in a cinematic reveal so far, with Ciri confirmed as the new protagonist replacing Geralt. There's also an open question about whether CD Projekt's influence extends to Unreal Engine 6, which Epic is building with heavy AI integration. Nowakowski has previously stated the studio isn't planning to rely on AI to make complete games, so how that tension resolves will be worth watching as both engines evolve.