Here's a good one for anyone who's ever tinkered with a game's files and wondered whether it counts for anything. CD Projekt Red's Pawe? Sasko, quest director on Cyberpunk 2077 and now associate game director on the sequel, says a big chunk of the people writing Cyberpunk 2's quests got there through modding.
"I think half of the quest team is all former modders."
Speaking in a Flow Games interview, Sasko put the quest team at around 24 people, pulling in modders from the Witcher and Cyberpunk communities and beyond. One of the quest directors, B?a?ej Augustynek, cut his teeth modding StarCraft. There's also a roughly 20-person team called Jigsoft, made up entirely of modders, who built the modding tools for The Witcher 3.
The takeaway for aspiring devs
Sasko's advice is blunt and genuinely useful: if you want to break into making games, learn to mod. "There are so many toolkits, so many ways to do it, and some of the best people we have are former modders."
It's easy to be cynical when a studio praises the free labour of its own community, and the modding-to-salaried-job route is far from guaranteed for most people who try it. But as a way in, it's real, and CDPR clearly isn't just saying it. The hires are on the payroll. Cyberpunk 2 is still a long way out, so treat the team numbers as a snapshot rather than a final headcount.
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