'Cyberpunk 2077' Made Back All Its Development Costs In One Day
Published
Featured Image Credit: CD Projekt Red
Cyberpunk 2077 has squared away eight years of development costs in only one day after its launch last week.
Though it's a staggering announcement, the writing was on the wall for the dystopian role-playing game. More than eight million pre-orders were received, which in profits, calculates to be somewhere around the $500 million mark for CD Projekt Red. That's before the game even arrived, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt secured 1.5 million pre-orders in comparison, which is still nothing to sniff at. Now, the studio has confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 remunerated its costs over almost a decade of work in this (warning: extremely dry) report released on Friday.
"The Management Board of CD PROJEKT S.A. with a registered office in Warsaw (hereinafter referred to as 'the Company') hereby announces that the estimated licensing royalties receivable by the Company in association with pre-order sales of Cyberpunk 2077 across all of its digital distribution channels have exceeded the sum of the following: total development expenditures related to the game, and the game's marketing and promotional costs borne by the Company - either already incurred or anticipated for the remainder of 2020," it reads. The motivation to reveal this information is spurred by its "potential impact on investment-related decisions."
Even though the studio has seen mega gains from sales of Cyberpunk 2077, those possible "investment-related decisions" are on their radar. Following the third delay to hit the game this year, the company's share price plummeted from $117 in August to $85 in November: a decrease of 25%. Unfortunately, its woes didn't end there, as stated by GamesIndustry.biz. Before the game's release, share prices were staying steady at $121. Afterwards, the price had fallen once again to $86, which was a decrease of 29% between December 4th and December 11th.
The primary reason for this is thought to be the conclusions from clips of the game circulating on social media, which show significant bugs and glitches in the game. Honestly, it'd be funny if we didn't know that employees had been crunching for the majority of the year, and that their bonuses were originally conditional on the game getting a score of 90 on Metacritic. Lots of reviewers, though generally positive about the game's themes and mechanics, did agree that Cyberpunk 2077 needed more time in the oven. Hopefully, these lessons have been learned for the upcoming multiplayer modes.
Topics: News, Cyberpunk 2077
