Cyberpunk 2077 may have had a rocky launch, but boy has it been a financial success. The game had sold over eight million copies on Day One alone. Earlier, CD Projekt revealed in their investor call that they already recouped all the development and marketing cost from digital pre-orders alone. All the sales from now on will be pure profit.
The success of Cyberpunk 2077 just doesn’t stop there. Yesterday, the company revealed that the game sold 13 million copies by December 20. That is quite an impressive number. This is the kind of number that behemoth titles like Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption 2 make.
CD Projekt Red says that it has sold 13 million copies of Cyberpunk through digital and physical distribution channels as of December 20.
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) December 22, 2020
This number factors in refunds processed by this point at both retail / digital.
The game had 8m pre-orders prior to launch. pic.twitter.com/ZIg4j9nDeB
What’s more interesting is that these sales figures included the refunds. Unconditional refunds are being offered by CD Projekt for Xbox and PlayStation owners. Cyberpunk 2077 got removed by PlayStation Store due to its technical shortcoming. Yet it seems that all this didn’t have a lot of effect on its sales. But who knows, maybe if the past-gen port was playable and the game had less game-breaking bugs, the sales would have been much higher.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows for CD Projekt, though. The company’s founder lost over a billion dollars in stock value due to the difficult launch. There were even talks of a class-action lawsuit by the investors due to misrepresentation. It seems like this is the reason why CD Projekt revealed the sales stats.
The last line of the investor note said: “The Management Board has decided to disclose the above information in the form of a current report due to its potential impact on investment-related decisions.” This is obviously an attempt by the company to convince investors not to sue.
Bad launches are not new in the gaming industry. CD Projekt’s previous game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt also had some technical issues (not to this extent, though). Other massive titles like Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Battlefield 4, and Fallout: New Vegas suffered from horrendous launches riddled with bugs and technical issues. But they've all recovered from it.
