CDPR Says Half of Cyberpunk 2 Quest Team Came From Modding
During the RedStreams broadcast held around the launch of the Cyberpunk 2077 2.5 update, CD Projekt Red co-game director Paweł Sasko shared a detail likely to energize the modding community: roughly half of the quest team currently working on Cyberpunk 2 previously worked as mod authors. The revelation positions the studio’s hiring pipeline as something closer to a talent funnel than a novelty. According to Sasko, the pattern has held steady even as the team expanded, rather than fading as production scaled up heading into October 2026.
Sasko used the broadcast to address young developers hoping to break into the industry. “Whenever young people ask me how to get into this industry, I always suggest they go make mods,” he said, according to a report on the subject. His recommendation is backed by hiring data rather than sentiment: at the time of the statement, roughly half of the 24 people on the Cyberpunk 2 quest design team came from the modding community, with some members’ experience stretching back to The Witcher 2 era.
The studio’s reliance on modding talent extends beyond recruitment into its tooling and development workflow. CD Projekt Red maintains an internal team of about 20 people called Jigsoft, made up entirely of former mod authors, which helped ship REDkit, the official modding toolkit for The Witcher 3. The company also partnered with the modding platform mod.io to bring cross-platform mod support to Cyberpunk 2077 version 2.5 on consoles including PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch 2.
Drawing developers from modding communities is not a new idea. Valve’s Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, along with Krafton’s PUBG, all began as modding projects before becoming standalone commercial products. What makes CD Projekt Red’s approach notable is scale: the studio is applying this logic to the core development of a AAA sequel, rather than treating it as an isolated, headline-friendly hiring case. For aspiring developers, the message is unusually concrete — a released mod can function as a portfolio piece for a major studio.
