CD Projekt Red saw more than eight million pre-orders for its dark and dystopian action-adventure Cyberpunk 2077, which is a massive achievement for the game.
Honestly, Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be gunning for the title of "most divisive game of 2020," for a range of reasons. Firstly, you've got the delays. There were three all in all, and each were met with disappointment, as the prolonging of the project didn't avoid the realities of crunch. Secondly, you've got the discovery that an unskippable cutscene has the potential to trigger serious seizures, and didn't come with an explicit warning about the lights. Thirdly, you've got the fact that the game itself is suffering on current-gen consoles, with lengthy loading times, pop-in textures, and glitches galore.
In spite of these three examples, it was still one of the most anticipated and hyped games of this decade, and these sales statistics show it. Eight million copies were pre-ordered across all of its platforms and across the world, so it had already outsold major releases from earlier in the year like Resident Evil 3, The Last of Us Part 2, and Ghost of Tsushima before it had even launched. Crikey. Still, a million is a very abstracted number for a lot of people, not to mention eight of them. If only we had some sort of comparison to draw?
Fortunately, analyst Daniel Ahmad has the context we so sorely require. Pre-selling eight million copies of Cyberpunk 2077 calculates out at approximately $500 million in revenue for the studio. Alternatively, Grand Theft Auto V raked in $800 million upon launch, when you add together its pre-orders and its day one sales. There's a gap between the two games, but it's more of a hop, skip and a jump than the Grand Canyon, and it's possible that Cyberpunk 2077 does close in on Grand Theft Auto V's stunning sales.
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Watch this space, I suppose. Now that the game is out in the wild, players have been sharing their customisable characters, and there's some real creativity on display. You could play as musician Jared Leto, or Keanu Reeves from the '90s, or as Peter Griffin from Family Guy. Yes, you read that correctly.
Featured Image Credit: CD Projekt RedTopics: News, Cyberpunk 2077
