Adam Kiciński

Adam Kiciński co-founded CD Projekt in 1994 in Warsaw, Poland, and has served as its Joint CEO for over two decades, building the company from a small game distributor into one of the world's most valuable independent game studios. The company operates two main divisions: CD Projekt RED, the development studio behind The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077, and GOG.com, a digital game distribution platform competing with Steam. CD Projekt's journey has been one of the most dramatic in gaming. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) became one of the greatest RPGs ever made, selling over 50 million copies and establishing CD Projekt as a AAA studio. But the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 in December 2020 was catastrophic — the game was near-unplayable on last-generation consoles, resulting in Sony pulling it from the PlayStation Store, a stock crash of over 60%, and a class-action lawsuit. Kiciński took responsibility and committed to fixing the game. The redemption arc under Kiciński's leadership was remarkable: over two years of patches, a next-gen upgrade, and the critically acclaimed Phantom Liberty expansion restored Cyberpunk 2077's reputation, ultimately selling over 30 million copies. Kiciński is now overseeing CD Projekt's most ambitious expansion: simultaneous development of The Witcher 4 (codenamed Polaris), a Cyberpunk sequel, and two additional Witcher games, requiring the studio to scale from one project at a time to multiple parallel productions. His decisions on studio scaling, project management methodology, technology choices (switching from REDengine to Unreal Engine 5), and release timing are the critical variables for one of gaming's most momentum-driven stocks.