Friday, March 31st 2023
Cyberpunk 2077 Experiences Sales Boost, CD Projekt Rakes in Almost $222 Million in Revenue
CD Projekt has revealed that 2022 was its second-best year in terms of financial results - it cites an uptick in sales of action role-playing shooter Cyberpunk 2077 as the main reason behind the nice boost to its earnings - around $222 million in revenue, leading to about $80 million in net profit. The Cyberpunk intellectual property has expanded beyond the scope of the video games format and onto the small screen - evidently a combination of the Netflix anime series adaptation and continued efforts into polishing and expanding the game has spread a positive word of mouth. The company states: "In 2022 CD PROJEKT RED carried out intensive work on Cyberpunk 2077, which resulted in successive updates and the next-gen console edition of the game. An important event was the well-received Netflix premiere of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. It attracted many new players to the game, and convinced many others to revisit Night City."
Adam Kiciński, CEO of CD PROJEKT was buoyed by these results and set expectations for continuations in both fields in the future: "The popularity of the series and the positive reception of the update, released a week before the premiere, had a notable effect on Cyberpunk sales and general sentiment around the game, as evidenced by gamers' reviews. This is a clear sign that deeper involvement in our franchises and expanding their reach is the right way to go. Another important event supporting the Cyberpunk franchise will be the release of Phantom Liberty - a large expansion scheduled for this year."
Industry analysts are somewhat surprised by the company's good fortunes in 2022 - after all, no new mainline game has been released by the development or publishing group since the Cyberpunk 2077 launch date in late 2020. The game managed to top sales figures of 13 million units sold within ten days of its December 10 release date. The Witcher series continues to sell in healthy numbers, which also helps to bolsters the company's bottom line.
CD Projekt has undertaken rapid studio growth in recent years, and has even invested in operations within its home country of Poland as well as outfits overseas. Major plans were outlined in 2022 for the parallel development of multiple Witcher games, and a transition to the usage of Unreal Engine 5 for all future titles, in order to embrace more industry tools. It was widely reported that the team experienced major headaches connected to its proprietary REDengine during the making of Cyberpunk 2077. One of their Witcher spin-off games, Project Sirius, is currently on rocky ground - and the company recently revealed that Sirius is being restarted following a complete write-off of funds spent on pre-production at The Molasses Flood studio. CD Projekt's excellent 2022 sales figures will lessen that relatively small financial blow.
The company will be stashing a lot of the extra cash into ambitious growth plans, Piotr Nielubowicz, Vice President and CFO of CD PROJEKT said: "Thanks to solid sales of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 our consolidated revenues reached 953 million PLN, with over 347 million PLN in net profit. A large portion of this profit - over 200 million PLN - was invested in our future development projects."
The Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty DLC will only be released to current-gen platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, as well as PC. It is expected to launch later in 2023 - CD Projekt Red has hinted that a proper reveal event is incoming around June time.
Source:
CD PROJEKT Official News
Adam Kiciński, CEO of CD PROJEKT was buoyed by these results and set expectations for continuations in both fields in the future: "The popularity of the series and the positive reception of the update, released a week before the premiere, had a notable effect on Cyberpunk sales and general sentiment around the game, as evidenced by gamers' reviews. This is a clear sign that deeper involvement in our franchises and expanding their reach is the right way to go. Another important event supporting the Cyberpunk franchise will be the release of Phantom Liberty - a large expansion scheduled for this year."
CD Projekt has undertaken rapid studio growth in recent years, and has even invested in operations within its home country of Poland as well as outfits overseas. Major plans were outlined in 2022 for the parallel development of multiple Witcher games, and a transition to the usage of Unreal Engine 5 for all future titles, in order to embrace more industry tools. It was widely reported that the team experienced major headaches connected to its proprietary REDengine during the making of Cyberpunk 2077. One of their Witcher spin-off games, Project Sirius, is currently on rocky ground - and the company recently revealed that Sirius is being restarted following a complete write-off of funds spent on pre-production at The Molasses Flood studio. CD Projekt's excellent 2022 sales figures will lessen that relatively small financial blow.
The company will be stashing a lot of the extra cash into ambitious growth plans, Piotr Nielubowicz, Vice President and CFO of CD PROJEKT said: "Thanks to solid sales of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 our consolidated revenues reached 953 million PLN, with over 347 million PLN in net profit. A large portion of this profit - over 200 million PLN - was invested in our future development projects."
45 Comments on Cyberpunk 2077 Experiences Sales Boost, CD Projekt Rakes in Almost $222 Million in Revenue
yawn. so sad to me companies don't have an ounce of creativity left in their bones, when so many great sci fi and fantasy authors do, use that money to buy their ideas and make a game off of that.
Wait for the final DLC before starting if you haven't yet.
Aim for the moon hit the ceiling kind of situation.
FPS games with some cliche cyberpunk elements is not innovative imo.
there are so many other ideas out there.
The detailed stats and progress options are overwhelming at first. I honestly don't know which route I want to go (hacker, guns blazing, etc). I feel many more details need to be explained in the beginning.
It's an OK game so far. Kind of funny how there's all this immense tech in 2077, but people are still driving cars themselves, there are food vendors on the streets, etc.
The C2077 NPCs are nearly lifeless. They just walk around, unphased by me or themselves. Very little or any dialogue. Red Dead Redemption 2 has the best NPCs IMO. Lots of dialogue. They got sketched out if you walk up to them and stare at them. If you just hang out at different NPC full locations, they say and do differnt things. If you hang around your crew after a mission, they'll just keep talking about the mission or other random things. The game is so rich with random dialogue it feels very immersive. I'd imagine most people don't even experience it if they just got point A to point B and repeat. I put about 200 hours into that game lol.
In C2077, I feel it would be nice if, for dialogue cutscenes, it would cut to both you and those involved (like the recent Tomb Raider Games and RDR2). That cutscene mechanic also adds to immersion. Otherwise, the games feels kind of flat.
With every option maxed out, I have to run it at 1080P with "Quality" DLSS on my 3080 12GB and 3080TI builds to achieve 70+ FPS constantly.
1) most developers & publishers want to own the IP and not lease it from other people otherwise you run into the problem CDPROJEKT had when they had to pay the witcher author more money after the success of Witcher III. It's simply better for your bottom line to own the IP, hence why Bioware moved on from DnD and Star Wars to create DA and ME.
2) Regardless of how you feel about CyberPunk, it was something new for CD PROJEKT and many people came out and killed for not cloning the witcher with a futuristic setting reskin. Now they are going back to the witcher and people are on them for just doing the same IP.
While I felt CP2077 was only ok my wife loved it. It was also the only First person game she's ever liked. I think the difference was just expectations I got caught up in the hype to her it was just another game to play.
I kind of enjoyed my time with the game and by then it was mostly bug free or only ran into insignificant bugs that didn't really cause issues. 'some collision related bugs here and there but nothing game breaking'
Not a fan of how my playthrough ended but I guess thats just my luck for going that route.
Definitely gonna check out/play the DLC at some point.
I'm more of a Witcher series fan but Cyberpunk was a pleasant surprise and a decent enough experience for me.
I'm kinda bummed that this is the swan song of the Red Engine not a huge fan of every major game using UE5 going forward.
Bug reports aside sure wasn't my cup of tea for what they wanted for it.
The city seems relatively lifeless still compared to GTA4 and 5. They don't have nearly the NPC clone issues they have, but NPC can still disappear shortly after they leave your sight. Mostly no interactions or life outside of a few very scripted sequences meant to specifically draw your attention as mini-objective/events. The cops are still broken (overpowered and still teleporting), though they don't teleport behind you in dead ends anymore.
The game falls far short of what they promised and no amount of surface-level patching is going to fix the issues the game has in its bones.
I went exploring the world and there are so many locations in the game that feel so stripped of what they should have been. There's a mega large rave location in the game but you literally can't do anything there. None of the NPCs seem to care you exist, you can't dance, you can't interact with anything. 99% of the doors in this game are locked and really the scale of the game is nowhere near what you'd expect. The game takes place in a mega city with thousand floor buildings yet you can at best walk around 5% of a few buildings with only a handful of the apartments actually being accessible. Even the Witcher 3 had more accessible buildings and that's considering that game had vastly lower building density. I thought GTA V was bad with the number of compromises they made in interactivity in order to scale up the game world but CP2077 sacrifices pretty much everything. As you said there's not a lot going on in the world outside of the player. NPC dialog when you are out and about is just boring generic cookie cutter stuff the same as the vast majority of the side quests. The hacking mini-game gets so boring that I just stopped doing it. In fact I straight up stopped playing the game 20 hours in because the gameplay was boring and when I did stumble upon something cool, it ended up being a facade that had no interesting content to back it up. Oh there's cool expensive mansions this part of town? Many there's a hidden quest of I can rob them! Nope, in fact wasting my time going through all the rich manors the only thing I found was a unique gun schematic with strangely not a single bit of lore or reason as to why it was there. It's a complete 180 from the witcher 3 where bits of lore and store were intertwined everywhere.
IMO the latest entry in the Deus Ex franchise is superior and that's considering that it wasn't the best entry in the series. That's me not getting into them lying about so many features that didn't make it into the game, that's a whole different can of worms. Most of the things they said would be in the game are not in the game.
I would not recommend the game to anyone because frankly by buying the game you are giving CP Project red and others an endorsement that pushing out buggy mediocre, half-made games is ok.
The sad part is upper management was 100% the reason the game launched too early and were never punished. It's akin to how Casey Hudson was being pased around Bioware ruining all their big franchises, how the guy kept a high end roll after he locked out his writers for the end of Mass Effect 3 is beyond me. Historically bad incompetence goes unpunished.
Think of it like Bethesda and all the bugs that were originally in Oblivion that eventually even made it into fallout and skyrim.... All made possible because they all used the same engine and the developers were too lazy to roll over the fixes to their newer games which left the community to make their own patches and fix the game themselves.
It shouldnt have been this way and community mods arent a silver bullet by any means but they do fix a lot of things and also add extra content so at least CDPR did leave the door open for the community to deal with it, otherwise CP2077 would have been one of the biggest flops in gaming history.
Biggest complaint from me was probably the dead world. The game had and still has the most beautiful made-up city ever created in video games, but it just feels so lifeless.
@CDProjektRed
Carry on good folks! You're doing great! Kicking ass and taking numbers!