The creators of The Witcher 4 and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel are in a "dangerous position" - the creator of Anthem assessed CD Projekt RED's prospects

It is assumed that CDPR now needs to sell a lot of copies to start making a profit.

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah, who worked on the Dragon Age franchise and Anthem, shared his concerns about the AAA industry in an interview with Summer Eternal Anthology.

He noted that the gaming industry has become too specialized and teams are growing. As an example, he cited a typical situation with an AAA game: "No one can add anything to an AAA game alone. It takes at least five people to do that."

Teams are getting bigger, and the costs of maintaining them (salaries, office rent, equipment, software, etc.) are increasing. Such large teams, Darrah explains, are more vulnerable to missed deadlines — delays are very expensive:

If you have a team of 500 people and you're a month behind schedule, that's probably an immediate 5-10 million added to the budget. It doesn't take much [to miss deadlines]. It's very easy for a team of 500 people to fall a month behind schedule just due to minor operational glitches.
Image source: CD Projekt RED

According to Darrah, the market will eventually split: "GTA VI will break away and pull another 5-6 games with it — into the big leagues, where you can spend as much money as you want on development and everything will be fine." Many other market participants will not be able to afford this. Darrah noted that too many projects with a budget of 100 million dollars do not pay off; their creators will have to give up chasing such giants.

In the same interview, Darrah shared concerns about the future of CD Projekt RED, which is preparing The Witcher 4 and a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. According to the developer, the studio now belongs to the aforementioned "big league" of games like GTA VI, and "now [CDPR's] games need to sell 15-20 million copies to make money." And, Darrah believes, this puts CDPR in a "really dangerous position."

But overall, Darrah is quite optimistic. In the event of such a market split, he expects to see many more studios the size of Sandfall Interactive (the creators of the acclaimed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33). Typically, studios have representatives of all necessary specialties on staff, but Sandfall skillfully used outsourcing to expand its capabilities.