CD Projekt Red, Techland receive grants from Polish government's $27.4m research fund

Poland's biggest games developers have received hefty new grants from the nation's National Center for Research of Development as part of an initiative to grow the local games scene.

The 116m Polish zloty fund, equating to $27.4m or £22m, will be issued to Techland, CI Games, Bloober Team, Flying Wild Hog and more, with CD Projekt Red receiving the biggest grant, according to WCCFTech.

The studio behind The Witcher III has received 30m zloty ($7m) towards four proposals from its games development team, as well as a proposal by the GOG.com team to create a "generic support cross-platform multiplayer gaming software for popular consoles and operating systems".

CD Projekt Red plans to use the grant towards research into seamless multiplayer, cinematic feel, animation excellence and city creation, with the latter focusing on "cities of great scale based on the principles of artificial intelligence and automation". While it isn't specified which games this research will benefit, it's a safe bet that the city creation and seamless multiplayer will go into the studio's forthcoming Cyberpunk 2077. If so, the game would be CD Projekt Red's first multiplayer title.

Techland, meanwhile, received two grants including one for developing a prototype for a first-person fantasy RPG. CI Games' grant will fund research into AI algorithms, while The Farm 51 will be researching photorealistic 3D graphics and a potential AR and VR battlefield simulator.

Thanks largely to CD Projekt and Techland, video games has become a prominent industry within Poland, and grants and government funding initiatives such as this can only help further support that.