Plans for a multiplayer-focused Witcher game codenamed ”Project Sirius” from CD Projekt Red, are now being overhauled. A new report says that the project’s original main development team, The Molasses Flood, is seeing dozens of layoffs as CDPR has “changed” its plans.
On Thursday, CD Projekt Red released an announcement labeled “New framework for Project Sirius, decision concerning partial reversal of the impairment allowance for 2022, and writeoff of part of the development expenditures incurred in Q1 2023”.
The announcement, published on CD Projekt Red’s regulatory announcements corporate page, goes on to say that the report is being made as the company “hereby announces the conclusion of work on defining a new framework for Project Sirius, which is carried out by The Molasses Flood (“The Project”)”. The rest of the report concerns updated financial expenditures on the development so far, and mentions some of the company’s plans going forward on the project. Back in March, they announced that there would be some reconsideration of the project, and the company estimated how much they’d be writing off as a result.
This newest report updates all of that, and it comes amid reports (and confirmation, via Kotaku) of layoffs affecting 29 employees in the US and Poland.
Sirius is a codename for the game developed by @molassesflood, set in The Witcher universe and created with support from CDPR. It will differ from our past productions, offering multiplayer gameplay on top of a single-player experience including a campaign with quests and a story pic.twitter.com/aoX7wlIfRO
— CD PROJEKT RED (@CDPROJEKTRED) October 4, 2022
Just what this means for the project seems to be an overhaul that will take what The Molasses Flood already developed and use it as the basis for what form Project Sirius takes next.
“The decision [is] to continue the Project in the reformulated framework based on a material part of the already developed elements of the game by the Molasses Flood”.
Financial reconsiderations are lowered from their first estimates. If this says anything about how much they are overhauling, we may never know.
Still, this is one of a number of projects based on The Witcher franchise in the works.
