The Witcher 4 dev says it takes 5-6 years to make a game after the idea's conception - but isn't saying when The Witcher 4 was thought up

gamesradar.com:

There's been a lot of anticipationaround The Witcher 4 -and the rest of CD Projekt Red now that it has multiple projects in the pipeline for The Witcher and Cyberpunk franchises — and understandably, people also want to know when they can expect to play these new games.

During a recent end-of-year earnings call focusing on the developer's performance in 2024 and what's ahead, CDPR leadership, including Joint Chief Executive Officer Michał Nowakowski, gave some insight on the development timeline for their games, starting from the early talks of a project to full development. This gives us some insight into just how long it takes for CDPR to work on their large-scale games such as The Witcher 4 and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel.

"From the very investigating ideas stage, so really when the first couple of people went into a room and say "hey, how about we make the next Witcher game," that's how long it takes – from the moment they start working on the paper and not going into what we call production phase in our vocabulary when talking about games," said Nowakowski. "So when we start discussing ideas for the game, we start providing for development of these games. But it's not 3 to 5 years of development, but more like 5 to 6 years of development -- I want to clarify that point."

This earnings call has announced that the next core entry in the Witcher series – codenamed Polaris – has entered full production following its pre-production phase, which focused on conceptualizing the scope and building up resources for the project. However, when asked during the call when Polaris, in particular, started its conceptualizing phase, Nowakowski sidestepped from providing an answer.

"I'm not going to answer that question, obviously, because that would be leading to pointing out a date, which we're not doing, but thank you, that was a very clever way to ask that question," said Nowakowski.

Currently, CDPR and its divisions have several projects on their slate. The core CDPR