CD Projekt Red S.A. () 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 2.3 billion, and by May 2020, had reached a valuation of , 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".
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 Alliances 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 Alliances 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.
Sales were satisfactory, and the development of sequels began almost immediately after The Witcher release. The team began the design work for The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and experimented with consoles to develop a new engine for The Witcher 3. Their development was halted when the team began work on The Witcher: White Wolf, a console version of The Witcher. Although they collaborated with French studio Widescreen Games for the console port, it entered development limbo. Widescreen demanded more manpower, money and time to develop the title, complaining that they were not being paid; according to Iwiński, CD Projekt paid them more than their own staff members. The team cancelled the project, suspending its development. Unhappy with the decision, Atari demanded that CD Projekt repay it for funding the console port development and Iwiński agreed that Atari would be the North American publisher of the sequel of The Witcher 2. CD Projekt acquired Metropolis Software in 2008.
The dispute over White Wolf was costly; the company faced bankruptcy, with the 2008 financial crisis as a contributing factor. To stay afloat, the team decided to focus on The Witcher 2 with the Witcher 3 engine. When the engine (known as Red Engine) was finished, the game could be ported to other consoles. To develop The Witcher 2, the company suspended development of Metropolis' first-person shooter, titled They. After three-and-a-half years of development, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was released in 2011 to critical praise and sales of more than 1.7 million copies.
After The Witcher 2, CD Projekt wanted to develop an open-world game of a quality similar to its other games, and the company wanted to add features to avoid criticism that it was Witcher 2.5. They wanted to push the game's graphics boundaries, releasing it only for the PC and eighth-generation consoles. This triggered debate on the team, some of whom wanted to release the game for older consoles to maximise profit. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt took three-and-a-half years to develop and cost over $81 million. A report alleged that the team had to crunch extensively for a year in order to meet release date deadlines. After multiple delays, it was released in May 2015 to critical praise. Wild Hunt was commercially successful, selling six million copies in its first six weeks and giving the studio a profit of 236 million złoty ($62.5 million) in the first half of 2015. The team released 16 free content downloads and two paid expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. The team decided that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt would be the final game in the series with Geralt. Regarding the future of the Witcher series, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director of The Witcher 3, stated in May 2016 that he hoped to continue working with the series sometime in the future, but had nothing planned at the time.