CD Projekt

CD Projekt started in 1994 as a small Polish game distributor founded by Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński, who had previously run a retail shop. The company made its name by translating Western games into Polish, notably the Baldur's Gate series. When a planned port of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance fell through due to Interplay's financial troubles, CD Projekt repurposed the code to create its own game. That became The Witcher (2007), a dark fantasy RPG based on Andrzej Sapkowski's novels. The game's success pushed the company to focus on original development under the CD Projekt Red label, formed in 2002.

The studio's reputation grew with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011) and peaked with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), a sprawling open-world RPG that won numerous Game of the Year awards. In 2020, CD Projekt released Cyberpunk 2077, a highly anticipated sci-fi RPG set in a dystopian metropolis. Though its launch was marred by technical issues, the game sold millions and received extensive updates. The company also runs GOG.com, a DRM-free digital store launched in 2008, which was sold back to co-founder Kiciński in 2025.

Financially, CD Projekt grew from a small distributor into Europe's largest publicly traded game company by market cap, peaking at $8.1 billion in 2020. The company joined Poland's WIG20 index in 2018. In 2026, it rebranded from CD Projekt S.A. to CD Projekt RED S.A. to unify its corporate identity with its development studio. [edit]