Rebel Wolves' Konrad Tomaszkiewicz wants to avoid repeating his CDPR past

There are plenty of lessons the developers at Rebel Wolves have learned from their time at CD Projekt Red, and one of the biggest is keeping things small.

Talking to Bloomberg, founder Konrad Tomaszkiewicz explained the studio won't grow to the scale of the Witcher and Cyberpunk outfit. Chiefly, he feels things can get lost the more hands you put on a project, something that notably plagued Cyberpunk 2077.

"When you work at a company like ours, you don’t have 20 colleagues, you have five colleagues," said Tomaszkiewicz. "You need to do more, but at the same time, you have a bigger impact on the game."

Tomaszkiewicz began his game development career at CDPR nearly 20 years ago. While admitting a smaller team is "totally different work" from his old studio, he also viewed it as a pleasant refresh, saying he "missed the every-day contact with the rest of the team."

Speaking broadly, he noted how Rebel Wolves runs on a "team-first" policy, where "we’re thinking about what we can do to make the team motivated and happy."

Rebel Wolves is also its founder's comeback story

For Tomaszkiewicz, the policy serves as an opportunity to make amends for his past behavior. When he exited CDPR in 2021, he'd been accused of bullying staff, which he denied while saying he'd work on himself to ensure it didn't happen again.

As he tells it, working with a considerably smaller team has helped him improve his behavior and "have more empathy."

Bloomberg's report doesn't have insight from other developers on how much he's improved. But Tomaskiewicz admittedd a change in team interactions when there's less physical distance between them and go-betweens aren't used.

After starting Rebel Wolves, several CDPR staff (around 24, claims Bloomberg) joined. One of those hires was brother Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, who stood by Konrad during those initial allegations.

While Mateusz doesn't speak on the studio's culture, he noted . Rebel Wolves will work to "reduce the pressures on the team." At the same time, he was equally candid in calling it "very difficult to predict where we will land."