CD Projekt Red has announced that updated versions of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 won’t be out for new hardware until next year.

A short announcement was made on Twitter but a longer version is available, of all places, under the Regulatory Announcements section on the company website.

The longer company website statement reads as follows:

[CD Projekt] wishes to provide an update regarding its publication schedule for 2021 as concerns the release of dedicated versions of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for next-gen consoles (Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5). The Management Board of the Company hereby announces that, based on recommendations supplied by persons supervising development, it has decided to allocate additional time to both projects. The Company currently intends to release the next-gen version of Cyberpunk 2077 in the first quarter of 2022, and the next-gen version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in the second quarter of 2022.

While we did use the term “next-gen” in our headline to mirror this statement, is the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S really “next generation”? Both consoles are coming up on their first anniversaries so we’d argue they’re current generation.

That nitpick aside there’s a lot of bad blood in the community when you consider that Cyberpunk 2077 was launched on “last generation” consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Many believed that compromises were made to the game to get it running at all on the much older hardware of those consoles.

This is something we experienced first hand. While our Cyberpunk 2077 review was done on PC one of our writers spent their own money on a launch day digital code on PlayStation 4 only to find it completely unplayable.

This is, of course, not too much of a shock considering that Sony then removed the game from purchase on the PlayStation Store, a decision that was reversed earlier this year.

Will the next / current generation ports of the game, whenever they arrive, make up for all of this? Probably not.

There’s also the matter of The Witcher 3 which was released all the way back in 2015. We would have though that creating ports of it was something that was under control but we guess not.

Aside from missing holiday sales it will also miss the wave of hype created around the franchise when the second season of The Witcher Netflix series launches in December.