CD Projekt Red S.A. (Polish: [ˌt͡sɛˈdɛ ˈprɔjɛkt]) is a Polish video game company based in Warsaw, founded in May 1994 by Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński. Iwiński and Kiciński were video game retailers before they founded the company, which initially acted as a distributor of foreign video games for the domestic market. The department responsible for developing original games, CD Projekt Red, best known for The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077, was formed in 2002. In 2008, CD Projekt launched the digital distribution service Good Old Games, now known as GOG.com; the platform was sold to CD Projekt co-founder Michał Kiciński in 2025.
The company began by translating major video game releases into Polish, collaborating with Interplay Entertainment for two Baldur's Gate games. CD Projekt was working on the PC version of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance when Interplay experienced financial difficulties. The game was cancelled and the company decided to reuse the code for its own video game. It became The Witcher, a 2007 video game based on the works of novelist Andrzej Sapkowski.
After the release of The Witcher, CD Projekt worked on a console port called The Witcher: White Wolf; however, development issues and increasing costs led the company to the brink of bankruptcy. CD Projekt later released The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in 2011 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 2015, with the latter winning various Game of the Year awards. In 2020, the company released Cyberpunk 2077, a role-playing game based on the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop game system for which it opened a new division in Wrocław. A video game distribution service, GOG.com, was established by CD Projekt in 2008 to help players find old games. Its mission is to offer games free of digital rights management (DRM) to players and its service was expanded in 2012 to cover new AAA and independent games.
In 2009, CD Projekt's then-parent company, CDP Investment, announced its plans to merge with Optimus S.A. in a deal intended to reorganise CD Projekt as a publicly traded company. The merger was closed in December 2010 with Optimus as the legal surviving entity; Optimus became the current incarnation of CD Projekt S.A. in July 2011. By September 2017, it was the largest publicly traded video game company in Poland, worth about US$2.3 billion, and by May 2020, had reached a valuation of US$8.1 billion, making it the largest video game company in Europe. In March 2018, the company joined WIG20, an index of the 20 largest companies on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The company is also listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. On 23 June 2026, the website bankier.pl stated that the old company name CD Projekt S.A. was to be replaced by CD Projekt RED S.A. in order to "ensure consistency in the communication of the CD Projekt RED brand".
Contents
History
Founding
CD Projekt was founded in May 1994 by Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński. According to Iwiński, although he enjoyed playing video games as a child they were scarce in the Polish People's Republic (which experienced political unrest, martial law, and goods shortages during the 1980s). Marcin Iwiński, in high school, was selling cracked copies of Western video games at a Warsaw marketplace (stalls on the streets with many such products were popular in the newly established and aggressively privatised Third Polish Republic of the 1990s). In high school, Iwiński met Kiciński, who became his business partner; at that time, Kiciński was also selling video games.
Wanting to conduct business legitimately, Iwiński and Kiciński began importing games from US retailers and were the first importers of CD-ROM games. After Poland's transition to a primarily market-based economy in the early 90s, they founded their own company. Iwiński and Kiciński founded CD Projekt in the second quarter of 1994. With only $2,000, they used a friend's flat as a rent-free office.
Localization
The company was one of the first in Poland to localize games; according to Iwiński, most of their products were sold to "mom-and-pop shops". CD Projekt began partial localization for developers such as Seven Stars and Leryx-LongSoft in 1996, and full-scale localization a year later. According to Iwiński, one of their first successful localization titles was for Ace Ventura; whereas previous localizations had only sold copies in the hundreds, Ace Ventura sold in the thousands, establishing the success of its localization approach. With its methods affirmed, CD Projekt approached BioWare and Interplay Entertainment for the Polish localization of Baldur's Gate. They expected the title to become popular in Poland, and felt that no retailer would be able to translate the text from English to Polish. To increase the title's popularity in Poland, CD Projekt added items to the game's packaging and hired well-known Polish actors to voice its characters. Their first attempt was successful, with 18,000 units shipped on the game's release day (higher than the average shipments of other games at the time).
The company continued to work with Interplay after the release of Baldur's Gate, collaborating on a PC port for the sequel Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. To develop the port, CD Projekt hired Sebastian Zieliński (who had developed Mortyr 2093-1944) and Adam Badowski. Six months after development began, Interplay experienced financial problems and cancelled the PC version. CD Projekt continued to localize other games after Dark Alliance's cancellation. Especially the localization of Gothic (released in Poland in 2002) and Gothic II (in 2003), for which CD Projekt was also the publisher in Poland, was a success for the company. The main series of Gothic became very popular in Poland and – according to developers of CD Projekt itself – a primary influence in the later development of The Witcher game series. CD Projekt received Business Gazelle awards in 2003 and 2004.
CD Projekt Red
Enthusiasm for game distribution ebbed, and CD Projekt's founders wondered if the company should continue as a distributor or a game developer after Dark Alliance's cancellation. With the game cancelled and its code owned by CD Projekt, the company planned to use them to develop their first original game. They intended to develop a game series based on Andrzej Sapkowski's Wiedźmin books (which were popular in Poland) and the author accepted the company's development proposal. The franchise rights had been sold to Metropolis Software in 1997 and a playable version of the first chapter was made, but then left abandoned. CD Projekt acquired the rights to the Wiedźmin franchise in 2002. According to Iwiński, he and Kiciński had no idea how to develop a video game at that time.
To develop the game, the company formed a video game development studio, CD Projekt Red sp. z o.o. (stylised as CD PROJEKT RED), which was headed by Sebastian Zieliński in Łódź in 2002. The studio made a demonstration game, which Adam Badowski called "a piece of crap" in retrospect. The demo was a role-playing game with a top-down perspective, similar to Dark Alliance and Diablo, and used the game engine which powered Mortyr. Iwiński and Kiciński pitched the demo to a number of publishers, without success. The Łódź office closed and the staff, except for Zieliński, moved to the Warsaw headquarters.
Zieliński left the company, and Kiciński headed the project. Although the game's development continued, the demo was abandoned. According to CD Projekt, the development team had different ideas for the game and lacked overall direction; as a result, it was returned to the drawing board in 2003. The team, unfamiliar with video-game development, spent nearly two years organising production. They received assistance from BioWare, who helped promote the game at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo by offering CD Projekt space in their booth next to Jade Empire. BioWare also licensed their Aurora game engine to the company.
The game's budget exceeded expectations. The original 15-person development team expanded to about 100, at a cost of 20 million złoty. According to Iwiński, content was removed from the game for budgetary reasons but the characters' personalities were retained; however, there was difficulty in translating the game's Polish text into English. Atari agreed to publish the game. After five years of development, the game brought Wiedźmin to an international audience, and so the company adopted the English name, The Witcher, coined by Adrian Chmielarz. The Witcher was released in 2007 to generally positive reviews.
REDengine
REDengine is a game engine developed by CD Projekt Red exclusively for its nonlinear role-playing video games. It is the replacement of the Aurora Engine CD Projekt Red had previously licensed from BioWare for the development of The Witcher. REDengine is portable across 32- and 64-bit software platforms and runs under Windows. REDengine was first used in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for Windows. REDengine 2, an updated version of REDengine used in The Witcher 2, also runs under Xbox 360 and both OS X and Linux, however these ports were made using a compatibility layer similar to Wine called eON. REDengine 3 was designed exclusively for a 64-bit software platform, and also runs under PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. REDengine 2 utilized middleware such as Havok for physics, Scaleform GFx for the user interface, and FMOD for audio. The engine was used for the Xbox 360 port of The Witcher 2.
REDengine 3 was designed to run exclusively on a 64-bit software platform. CD Projekt Red created REDengine 3 for the purpose of developing open world video game environments, such as those of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It introduces improvements to facial and other animations. Lighting effects no longer suffer from reduced contrast ratio. REDengine 3 also supports volumetric effects enabling advanced rendering of clouds, mist, fog, smoke, and other particle effects. There is also support for high-resolution textures and mapping, as well as dynamic physics and an advanced dialogue lip-syncing system. However, due to limitations on texture streaming, the use of high-resolution textures may not always be the case.
REDengine 3 has a flexible renderer prepared for deferred or forward+ rendering pipelines. The result is a wide array of cinematic effects, including depth-of-view, color grading and lens flares associated with multiple lighting. The terrain system in REDengine 3 uses tessellation and layers varying material, which can then be easily blended. Cyberpunk 2077 used REDengine 4, which supported ray-traced global illumination and other effects. On 21 March 2022, CD Projekt announced a partnership with Epic Games after retiring REDengine to use Unreal Engine 5. In April 2022, Studio CTO Paweł Zawodny said that the decision to change engines came down to Unreal Engine 5's new focus on open world game design. Shifting to Unreal Engine 5 also enabled CD Projekt to leave much of the engine-level development to Epic Games, allowing the studio to focus primarily on creating its game.
Game distribution
In 2008, the company introduced Good Old Games, a distribution service with a digital rights management-free strategy. GOG.com aims to help players find "good old games", preserving old games. To do so, the team needed to unravel licensing issues for defunct developers or negotiate with publishers for distribution rights. To recover old code for conversion to modern platforms, they had to use retail versions or second-hand games. CD Projekt partnered with small developers and large publishers, including Activision, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, to broaden the service's portfolio of games to triple-A and independent video games.
Despite suspicions that it was a "doomed project", according to managing director Guillaume Rambourg, it has expanded since its introduction. As of June 2015, GOG.com sold 690,000 units of CD Projekt Red's game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt redeemed through the service, more than the second largest digital seller Steam (approx. 580,000 units) and all other PC digital distribution services combined. As of 8 July 2019, a third of Cyberpunk 2077 digital pre-orders were sold on GOG.com. Income from GOG.com (known internally as CD Projekt Blue) accrues to CD Projekt Red. GOG.com was sold by CD Projekt to Michał Kiciński, one of the original founders of GOG, in December 2025. The sale allows GOG to remain independent of CD Projekt, though the studio will continue to support GOG for its games. With its independence, GOG intends to focus more on preservation of video games while maintaining its ongoing support for DRM-free games.
Subsidiaries
Business views
The company claims to focus on certain aspects and features of a game at a time, in order to ensure quality. The company focuses on the development of role-playing games, with the team working on established franchises with a fan base and introducing lesser-known franchises to a wide audience. The studio has been praised for prioritising quest design over the size of the game world in its open-world games.
CD Projekt Red opposes the inclusion of digital-rights-management technology in video games and software. The company believes that DRM is ineffective in halting software piracy, based on data from sales of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. CD Projekt Red found that its initial release (which included DRM technology) was pirated over 4.5 million times; its DRM-free re-release was pirated far less. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077 were released without DRM technology. The team believes that free downloadable content should be an industry standard. The company demonstrated this by releasing several free DLC for Wild Hunt.
According to Studio Head Adam Badowski, CD Projekt Red avoided becoming a subsidiary of another company in order to preserve its financial and creative freedom and ownership of its projects. In 2015, Electronic Arts was rumoured to be attempting to acquire CD Projekt, but this was denied by Iwiński who said that maintaining the company's independence was something he would be fighting for. Financial details on development, marketing and release costs are freely published, citing being "open in communication" as one of the company's core values.
The company used to follow Rockstar Games' business model, where the company works on a single project with a large team and avoids working on multiple projects at the same time. In March 2021, it changed its strategy. From 2022 onward, it will work on multiple AAA games in parallel.
Controversy
In December 2021, CD Projekt agreed to pay $1.85 million while negotiating to settle a class-action lawsuit over the problematic release of Cyberpunk 2077, a game which at launch had several technical issues that many users experienced.