Kickass Cyberpunk 2077 Modders Become CD Projekt Red Devs

If you know anything about Cyberpunk 2077, an open-world romp about committing crimes with neo-John Wick, you know that it launched in rough shape. Much of the game’s eight-month lifespan has been defined more by patches and updates than anything else. But this news might help: The developer, CD Projekt Red, is hiring some high-profile modders from the community.

Since it was released last December, Cyberpunk 2077 has received intermittent mod support from the developer, resources like metadata and TweakDB file dumps. But the most helpful tools have come from the community.

The modders who will officially join CDPR are Traderain, Nightmarea, Blumster, and rfuzzo. They are best known as the folks behind WolvenKit, an open-source tool that allows modders to modify CD Projekt Red’s greatest hits, Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt In terms of Cyberpunk modding resources, WolvenKit is the gold standard, allowing you to edit any file in the game and, crucially, browse those files “without unpacking the archives.”

“We will be working on various projects related to the Cyberpunk 2077 backend and the game’s modding support,” Traderain wrote in an announcement on Cyberpunk 2077’s modding community Discord (via Reddit). “We are really excited for this and we really hope we can help to bring Cyberpunk 2077 to the next level!”

Traderain and Nightmarea, whose respective real names are Hambalkó Bence and Köte Ákos, co-founded and currently operate Yigsoft, a Budapest-based custom development studio. According to Bence, the crew of modders will join CDPR under Yigsoft. Bence told Kotaku via email that company will remain operationally separate, and will maintain its Budapest headquarters

“It has been a long time dream of ours to work for CDPR so it’s a dream come true,” Bence told Kotaku.

“We are working with Yigsoft on the development of Cyberpunk 2077 modding tools. The modding community has always been very important to us and we are happy to be working with them side by side on further expanding the tools which are available to modders,” a representative for CD Projekt Red told Kotaku in a statement.

Yigsoft’s jump to CDPR payroll isn’t the only instance of a modder getting scooped up by a massive company that produces the games they mod. Earlier this month, Stephanie Zachariadis, the head writer of the ridiculously ambitious Fallout: London—a forthcoming “DLC-sized” Fallout 4 mod that aims to show what Fallout looks like across the pond—was hired by Bethesda Game Studios. She’ll join the company as an associate quest designer.

Source: Kotaku.