Another piece of info to why Witcher 4 most likely will release from now till 2027:
Read the Top Right:
"Great potential in the global videogame market, estimated total volume in 2027: 213 Billion USD"
Now obviously this figure of $231B USD doesnt apply to CPDR (duh). But if they expect the market to hit that volume that's indication of a projected release window they wanna involve themselves in.
Remember also, they wanna make $1B USD Net Profit (Not Revenue) between 2025-2027.
They have stated since 2022 that UE5 will speed up the development process (obviously its an already existing toolset they can use or alter) - which they did btw they have said many times since the Trailer dropped they are using their own Custom Built UE5.
CDPR has almost double the internal devcount of Witcher 3 working on Witcher 4 (Slightly less than Cyberpunk because CDPR is kicking concept and pre-production for other projects)
CEO Nowakowski said 2025 will have a great bearing on their incentive goal - these bearings might be things like the 10th Anniversary Concert Tour, TW3 10th Anniversary Day on May 18th where maybe CDPR does a special big stream to celebrate and they show a surprise Witcher 4 Gameplay Trailer or Witcher 1 Remake Reveal or maybe even start Marketing Campaign later on during the end of the year.
Releasing in 2026-2027 means Witcher 4 would've been in development for 6-7 years (since as we know the game has been in development as early as 2020), 6-7 years of development is standard for High-Quality AAA games just like BG3 took 7 years to develop and RDR2 took around 8 years.
CEO Nowakowski also stated that development averages 5-6 years and development starts from the day the idea is pitched (Concept) till the games release (End of Full-Production and Launch Phase).