The Witcher 4 is set to be CD Projekt Red's most ambitious project yet, according to one industry analyst. Mateus Chrzanowski of Noble Securities (via Clawsome Gamer) estimates The Witcher 4's budget to be approximately $778.9 million (when converted from Zloty), making it more expensive than any of the studio's games to date.
Chrzanowski believes development costs will total around $389 million, and the rest of the money will be used for marketing. CD Projekt Red is no stranger to breaking the bank on marketing costs — hiring Keanu Reeves to act in and subsequently promote Cyberpunk 2077 can't have been cheap.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt—the game that catapulted CDPR into the pinnacle of AAA development—cost around $81 million to develop, while Cyberpunk 2077 had a substantially higher budget of around $400 million.
If The Witcher 4 were to cost $800 million, the title would have to be extremely successful to turn a profit. In comparison, Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 reportedly cost $300 million to develop, and there were murmurings that the game possibly didn't sell well enough to justify that price. However, Spider-Man 2 eventually cleared 16 million units a couple of years after release, which likely represents a...
